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ATOM HARVEST

TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

ATOM HARVEST

A BRITISH VIEW OF ATOMIC ENERGY

by
Leonard Bertin

W. H. FREEMAN AND COMPANY

=

l=ffl San Francisco 1957

Printed in Great Britain by

Spottiswoode, Ballantyne <2? Company Ltd.

London & Colchester

Introduction to the American Edition

By JOHN PFEIFFER

"ATOM HARVEST" presents for the first time to American
readers one important version of the course of Anglo-Ameri-
can relations in developing atomic weapons and atomic power,
during and after World War II. It is a frank and outspoken
book. It indicates quite explicitly the existence of some bitter-
ness among British scientific leaders, a bitterness which could
not be expected to appear in diplomatically impersonal official
statements.

According to Leonard Bertin, joint efforts went smoothly for
nearly two years, when scientists in Great Britain and the
United States were engaged in relatively small-scale activities.
Full cooperation and exchange of information was the rule
while they were simply exploring the possibility of achieving a
chain reaction. As soon as the possibility became a probability,
however, things began splitting at the seams. The $2-billion
Manhattan Project was born, under the military leadership of
Major General Leslie Groves, and British scientists often found
themselves barred from information and access to laboratories.

Early in 1943 the situation had reached a point where
Churchill sent a strongly worded cable to the White House.
The gist of the cable was that if atomic data were not shared
fully, Britain would be forced to make a "somber decision" and
organize a program of separate research. One result of this
message was an agreement, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt
in Quebec, involving the postwar exchange of information on
weapons and power production. But three years later the agree-
ment was kept secret from Congress while it passed legislation
prohibiting the release of such information to any nation
legislation which deprived America "of any right to share in
subsequent British achievements".

6 INTRODUCTION

Mr. Berlin elaborates on his thesis in some detail, using facts
which have not previously been brought together in one publi-
cation. Many American authorities will interpret the same facts
differently, but they are hardly likely to ignore "Atom Har-
vest". While the book is by no means an official statement, it is
based on interviews with members of Britain's Atomic Energy
Authority, among others and presumably reflects the personal
feelings of some people in high places. It is reasonable to expect
that when the full story of international cooperation is told, the
British version will be taken into account.

"Atom Harvest" is far more than a contribution to the
history of atomic energy, however. We may hope that the airing
of past difficulties will help shape policy in the future. The
broad problem of science and secrecy will not be solved for
some time to come. It involves the generally accepted notion
that certain information must be kept secret in the interest of
national security, particularly information concerning specific
weapons and countermeasures. But the laws of nature, the basic
discoveries upon which all applications depend, are not so
readily amenable to security regulations. Sooner or later, and
usually sooner, they become known wherever original research
is under way. Furthermore, there is always the matter of sharing
the information we have decided to classify. Should it be kept
secret from all nations or only from those that are unfriendly?
Do the advantages of sharing outweigh the risk of "leaks" to
potential enemies?

Such questions rarely have simple answers, and even the first
approximations to answers may demand an appreciable degree
of sophistication in things scientific. Yet nonscientists, including
the public and its elected representatives, are being called on
increasingly to consider legislation affecting the conditions
und^r which scientists work. The more completely we are in-
formed, the wiser our decisions will be and the more effec-
tively democracy will function. Granting that there are at least
two sides to every question worth bothering about in the first
place, books like "Atom Harvest" are one way we can keep
ourselves informed.

Incidentally, it would be a pity if the controversial political
aspects of the book obscured its value as a first-rate example of

INTRODUCTION 7

how science can be explained to laymen. Sometimes the pro-
fessional science writer assumes that his job is finished when he
obtains the facts and expresses them clearly. Indeed, this is
probably the most common mistake of the scientist who tries
earnestly and occasionally to communicate with laymen, and
may subsequently wonder why his message did not get across.
As every politician knows, even the most important and inter-
esting facts will not make a permanent impression unless they
are presented vividly and in human terms.

But there are many ways of "making an impression". It can
be done by sensationalizing, breaking confidences, and indulg-
ing in the sort of personal remarks commonly found in gossip
columns. Such tactics are less popular than they once were,
although they have not disappeared entirely. In any case, they
do little to improve relations between science and the press.
Mr. Bertin plays the game fairly, and is none the less readable
for that. His chapters include conversations and anecdotes
which not only make scientists come alive, but help us under-
stand points of particular significance.

Finally, I feel that W. H. Freeman and Company deserve
special recognition for making this book available to the
American public. The influence of publishers in bringing
science to nonscientists cannot be emphasized too strongly.
The viewpoints presented in "Atom Harvest" are more widely
known abroad than in the United States, and the free flow of
opinions about scientific policies is fully as important as the free
flow of technical information itself.

New Hope, Pa.
April, 1957.

Foreword

WHEN the war ended, America possessed a virtual monopoly in
the atomic energy field. With the encouragement and sub-
stantial aid of many foreign and foreign-born scientists she had
pushed the frontiers of knowledge far beyond the stage required
for the manufacture of atomic bombs. She possessed a diverse
collection of atomic reactors that provided stepping-stones into
vast new fields of application. That knowledge was hers to give
away or to keep. She kept most of it.

There is no attempt here to belittle the American achieve-
ment. The world has never seen the like of it before and it has
been well publicised. The aim of this book, instead, will be to
tell a little more about the British contribution to that war-
time effort and something about the way in which, in the years
after the war, she built up her own atomic industry, worth
hundreds of millions of pounds, in the face of American legisla-
tion which excluded her from any fair share in the fruits of
their war-time collaboration.

CONTENTS

Introduction to American Edition 5

Foreword 8

Author's Preface 1 3

Acknowledgements - 14

1 THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS 17

2 THE H-BOMB OUR SHIELD 22

3 ENERGY SPELLS PROSPERITY 32

4 THE ATOM is SPLIT 38

5 TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 51

6 THE PARTNERSHIP BREAKS DOWN 70

7 NUCLEAR MONOPOLY 80

8 HARWELL is BORN 88

9 FACTORIES ARE PLANNED 103

10 A KNIGHT IN A DUFFLE COAT 1 16

1 1 A TASTE OF TROUBLE 122

12 SECRET DEADLINE 132

13 CALCULATED RISK 140

14 THE FIRST FRUITS 149

15 THE PROJECT GROWS 156

1 6 CAPENHURST AN " ENGINEER'S DREAM " 1 69

17 THE SECOND BANG 175

1 8 How MANY BOMBS? 191

1 9 ISOTOPES FRIENDS OF MAN 1 98

20 THE ATOMIC EGG 208

2 1 THE GENETIC PRICE 2 1 5

22 BOMBS AND THE WEATHER 226

23 THE WAY AHEAD 231
Index 247

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

1 Sir John Cockcroft

2 Lord Rutherford and Cavendish Laboratory Workers

3 Construction of a Heavy Water Reactor

Photographs 1-3 follow p. 48

4 The First Large Atomic Power Station

5 The "Cooling Pond"

6 An Atomic Explosives Factory

7 Uranium Purification Plant

Photographs 4-7 follow p. 64

8 "Atomic" Explosion on Laboratory Bench

9 The Frigate Plym Disintegrates

10 The Men who Made the Emu Bang

n A Bomb on Whitehall

12 An Anderson Shelter, before and after Monte Bello

13 Test Models before and after Emu

14 Cloud after Monte Bello

15 The Second Explosion

Photographs 8-15 follow p.

1 6 The Men who Built the Factories

17 A Radio-isotope X-ray Camera

1 8 An X-ray Machine you could Swallow

19 Rays detect Bad Teeth

20 Inside your Telephone

2 1 Remote Control by Television

22 Television Photographs Ray-emitting Crystals

23 A Radioactive Ash Plant Photographs Itself

Photographs 16-23 follow p. 2O

10

LIST OF DIAGRAMS

The Chain Reaction 41

Enrichment of Uranium by Gaseous Diffusion 59

Map Atomic Energy Establishments in Britain 89

Mine to Factory The Flow of Materials 104

A Breeder Reactor The Dounreay Sphere 164

Inside a Reactor 166

ii

Author's Preface

IN WRITING this book I have drawn freely from a large number
of sources, both living and on the bookshelf. I have endeavoured
to acknowledge as many of them as possible below and I would
beg pardon for any inadvertent omissions.

I am particularly grateful to the United Kingdom Atomic
Energy Authority for the tremendous amount of help I have
received in my task. That help was freely promised by members
of the Board without any strictures except those of national
security long before even the author had any idea of the way
in which the book would be written. It goes without saying that
neither the Board of the Atomic Energy Authority, nor any of
its employees, nor any of the many other persons whom I have
consulted, are in any way associated with the views that are
expressed, or the inferences drawn. In fact, it is only fair to
say that in the matter of Anglo-American relations in the
atomic field the Authority do not agree with many of the
conclusions I have drawn.

Very early on in my researches I discovered how much had
been forgotten already about events of great national impor-
tance, even, in some cases, by people who took a major part in
them only ten years previously. It has been my common ex-
perience to find two eminent persons, both closely associated
with a particular happening, who have held widely differing
opinions, even on matters of fact. The task of weighing one
against another has not always been easy and compromise has
been made.

The book contains criticisms of American policy. They have
not been made in a spirit of bitterness or unfriendliness, and would
not have been made at all had it not been felt that the future
has lessons to learn from the past in these matters. In the air-
craft industry and in a number of other spheres including
several realms of atomic energy there is now a large measure of

14 AUTHOR'S PREFACE

collaboration between Britain and the United States. We should
be careful to see that such collaboration does not extend over
the whole sphere of fundamental science where Britain and
the Continental countries have always thrived, and end at the
stage where these ideas are ready to be exploited industrially.
It is in the field of technology that the Old World has most to
learn from the New. Britain is already paying too many
American companies for the right to use ideas that we were
initially responsible for developing.

The present American Administration, under the enlightened
leadership of President Eisenhower, has recently made a
number of very important steps towards fuller collaboration in
atomic matters. The "Atoms for Peace Plan", the 1954 Atomic
Energy Act, the initial offer of fissile material and of assistance
in building research reactors, the new agreement with Britain
signed in June, 1955, the International Conference on the
Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in August of the
same year, are all landmarks along the road that could lead
to a new Golden Age in which there are endless sources of
energy at man's disposal.

In this flush of new magnanimity in atomic matters it should
not be forgotten that European scientists, among whom were
many Britons, played the major part in unravelling the secrets
of the atomic nucleus. The United States, which were destined
by fate to reap the first technological results of this endeavour,
have delayed in releasing all-important technological material
and any share in stocks of vital materials until a moment when
it is abundantly clear that countries like Norway, France and
Russia are capable of reaching the same objectives on their
own and when Britain has achieved a leading role in the in-
dustrial atomic power field and in the sphere of nuclear weapons
development.

Acknowledgements

I should like to record my gratitude to the following persons
who assisted me in the collection of material for this book: Dr.
T. C. Carter, O.B.E., Sir James Chadwick, F.R.S., Prof. O. R.
Frisch, O.B.E., F.R.S., Prof. Hans Halban, Dr. J. F. Loutit,

AUTHOR'S PREFACE 15

Prof. W. V. Mayneord, Mr. M. W. Perrin, C.B.E., Prof. J.
Rotblat, Sir Francis Simon, C.B.E., F.R.S., Sir George Thom-
son, F.R.S., Viscount Waverley, P.C., F.R.S., the many people
of the Atomic Energy Authority whose names may not be listed
individually; to my Wife and to Miss Frances Randall for
their help in assembly and preparation of the typescript; to
Mr. K. E. B. Jay, author of Harwell and Britain's Atomic Factories
(H.M. Stationery Office), the Editor of Harlequin, magazine of
the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, and Mr. D. R.
Willson, for permission to borrow copiously from accounts of
the early years of the establishment. I would also like to
acknowledge the use of material from the following :

Sourcebook of Atomic Energy, Samuel Glasstone (Macmillan &
Co.}. Atomic Energy, H. D. Smyth (H.M. Stationery Office). Report
on the Atom, Gordon Dean (Alfred A. Knopf). The Atom, Sir
George Thomson (Oxford University Press). Power and Pros-
perity (Central Electricity Authority). Power, To-day and
To-morrow Dr. Sherwood Taylor (Frederick Miller). Nature
(Macmillan & Co.). Discovery (Jarrold & Son, Ltd.). Medi-
cine Illustrated (Harvey & Blythe, Ltd.). Atomic Scientists Journal
(Taylor & Francis, Ltd.). Research (Butterworth's Scientific
Publications).

My thanks are also due to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph
for permission to write this book and draw on some of my
previously published material.

L. B.

[I]

Through the Looking-glass

WE live in a new era. We have walked, as it were, through a
laboratory looking-glass into a strange new world in which the
very smallest things, atoms and sub-atoms, have become sud-
denly more important than all the big things. It is an epoch
when, to quote Sir Winston Churchill, a quantity of plutonium
less than would fill the famous dispatch-box in the House of
Commons, "would suffice to produce weapons that would give
indisputable world domination to any Great Power which was
the only one to have it".

That is the sombre side of the picture. There is a better one. The
ancient box that stands on the table before the Speaker's chair
is two feet long, and the three cubic feet of plutonium needed
to fill it would weigh a ton and a half. If put to useful purpose,
it could in theory do the work of nearly five million tons of coal.

There, in a nutshell, we have the whole problem created by
the discovery of nuclear fission. Like fire and the aeroplane,
atomic energy can be used for man or against him. Factory
processes can be speeded up or turned into a tangled mass of
wreckage. Lives can be saved by the life-giving properties of
energy under control or they can be blistered and burned by
the bomb's heat or poisoned by rays they can never see.

Atomic radiation can be used to produce new varieties of
disease-resistant corn, but it can just as effectively store up
deformity, both mental and physical, for future generations.
That is the atom. All its shame and all its glory.

The great hope for mankind lies, perhaps, in this very para-
dox. The great promise it offers to a world dedicated to peace
* '7

l8 ATOM HARVEST

may still provide man with the inspiration to improve his lot.
In the last resort, knowledge of the disastrous results that would
attend its use in war may yet supply the one sufficient deterrent.

Britain has given her own answer to this challenge. The posi-
tion she intends to take in the new atomic era has been stated
in two momentous declarations made within days of each other.

The first of them, on February 15, 1955, announced the de-
cision to go ahead at once on a programme of full-scale nuclear
power station construction, the first in the world, that would
provide electricity for industrial and domestic purposes at a
cost lower than that realised by the most modern coal-burning
stations.

The second, on February 17, 1955, ma de known the Govern-
ment's decision to manufacture the hydrogen bomb.*

However unpleasant that latter decision must have been, it
was as essential to the nation's security and future in 1955 as
was the equally unpleasant decision taken ten years earlier that
Britain, no longer able to hope for collaboration from the
Americans, must go ahead on her own to make the ordinary
atomic bomb and to catch up ground lost in the sphere of
peace-time applications.

That Britain should have had to walk that track alone after
all that the two nations had shared and suffered together was
an unhappy comment on those few in charge who were aware
of the true nature of the war-time partnership and a misguided
attempt to weigh dollars spent and dreams of future political
power and industrial wealth against certain intangible com-
modities, things like honour and respect, that are absent from
any table of equivalence.

The battle of peace was, after all, as important to win as
the battle of war. When the question of the bomb first arose the
Americans were very happy to obtain from the British all the
help they could and the British were only too glad to give it.
When the cessation of hostilities once more permitted British
scientists to leave subjects like radar for more productive work
and released engineers from the task of making munitions, it
would have helped so much if missions from the United King-

* The first two British hydrogen bombs were successfully exploded on
May 15 and May 31, 1957.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS 19

dom had been allowed to visit the great factories at Hanford
and Oak Ridge where atomic explosive and fuel was made.

No sooner had the great body of public opinion in America
learned of the new developments than it began to feel possessive
about the atom and jealous of rivals. People were worried lest
the new monster they had helped to produce might be turned
against them. Only four days after the formal Japanese sur-
render on August 14, 1945, a newly elected senator from
Connecticut, Brien McMahon, had introduced a Bill for the
domestic control of atomic energy.

President Truman's own views were stated on October 3, 1 945,
in a message to Congress. "The first and most urgent step", he
told them, "is the determination of our domestic policy for the
control, use and development of atomic energy within the
United States." He proposed that Congress declare it to be
unlawful to produce or use the substances comprising the
source of atomic energy or to import or export it except under
conditions prescribed by a commission. Mr. Truman went on to
say that he would initiate discussions "first with our associates
in this great discovery, Great Britain and Canada, and then
with other nations in an effort to effect agreement on the con-
ditions under which co-operation might replace rivalry in the
fields of atomic power". He rightly prophesied that "the
difficulties of working out such arrangements are great".

The day the President delivered his message to Congress a
Government Bill was introduced into both Houses for the
domestic control of atomic energy by a commission to which
service officers on active duty would be appointed. The Bill was
unpopular. The country was not keen to see such a promising
and important development left in the hands of the military.
The battle began to rage between opposing groups, the pro-
tagonists of military and civilian control. The scientists, as
might be expected, threw in their lot with the civilians.

On the precise day that in Britain an announcement was
made of the establishment of an atomic energy project the
American Government set up its own atomic energy committee,
with McMahon as chairman, "to make a full, complete and
continuing study and investigation with respect to problems
relating to the development and use of atomic energy". The

2O ATOM HARVEST

British Cabinet already guessed the outcome would not be in
their favour. By August of the following year, when the U.S.
Atomic Energy Bill, better known as the McMahon Act, re-
ceived Presidential assent, engineers of Britain's newly estab-
lished atomic energy production group were already planning
how to build on their own the first reactors.

The strictures of the McMahon Act created a fantastic
situation in which the United States completely slammed the
door on her British friends. This fact was recognised to their
credit by many prominent Americans. In a very fair book,
Report on the Atom, Mr. Gordon Dean, himself for three years
chairman of the American Atomic Energy Commission, wrote :
4 'Few people who have thought about the problem at all be-
lieve that it makes very much sense for these two great and
traditionally friendly countries to go their separate ways in the
new and challenging field of atomic energy". Gordon Dean
blamed British security methods for the lack of co-operation.
Many people felt, he said, that " until British security methods
are tightened, at least to the point where a Bruno Pontecorvo
cannot merrily wing his way from Harwell to Russia without
some kind of restriction, we cannot afford to be full partners".

The statement, however, reflected shortness of memory, for
the Americans, too, had had their embarrassments in the way
of atomic and non-atomic spies. It paid no attention either to
a point of view that is quite as strong over there as any security
consideration. Most of those Americans who are aware that
British scientists made any contribution to the bomb at all rate
such contributions meagrely when striking a balance. It is
something that cannot be calculated in dollars and cents, and
for lack of a monetary yardstick is apt to be shelved completely.

Senator McMahon tried to shelve it when he once discussed
the matter with me. There was the matter of security, too.
There were doubts about people like Fuchs, who when working
for Britain gave away secrets of the bomb. But McMahon's
condemnation here was clearly tempered by what he knew of
defections and suspected defections of many Americans. He
seemed to pay far more attention to another aspect. He chose
a simile from the life he knew at home when he tried to explain
it to me one night in a Strasburg hotel.

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS 21

McMahon saw America in the same light as a wealthy and
benevolent owner of horses for ever distributing largesse among
his many servants and dependents as reward for their loyalty,
coming to their assistance when they were in trouble, paying the
hospital bill when the wife had trouble with a new baby.
"Wouldn't you feel a bit resentful", he asked me, "if one of
those you had helped a great deal turned round one day and
demanded a share in the stable?"

But the matter was obviously one that he was unhappy about,
and he answered my questions about the war-time agreement
between Sir Winston Churchill and the American President
with a brusque "No comment!" "Next question?"

He was reported as saying afterwards in the United States
on one occasion that he would never have supported the
McMahon Act in the form it took had he been aware at the
time of the nature of that war-time agreement. It is difficult,
in fact, to believe that any Congress aware of its terms would
have done so.

America's unilateral termination of collaboration had two
effects. It deprived her of any right to share in subsequent
British achievements and it gave to Britain on the other hand
the satisfaction of knowing that all she has done she has done
on her own.

[2]

The H-bomb Our Shield

THERE were four good reasons why speedy development of
atomic energy was essential to Britain. The first was military,
the second was economic, and the third was the straight-
forward matter of prestige. The fourth was less tangible but
something still quite fundamental to humanity, the impelling
urge to devil out fresh secrets from nature, backed by the
knowledge that there can be no standing still. Man must march
forward or he will certainly be forced to retreat.

In the matter of prestige the inception of the atomic era has
brought with it a new criterion of greatness. It was no exaggera-
tion after Hiroshima to say that a nation without atomic
weapons could not remain a first-rank power in world politics,
That position has now been stretched still further. There are
those countries WITH the hydrogen bomb and those WITHOUT it.

Nations without this devastating means of defence and re-
prisal must always rely on "protector" countries. Even Britain
would have been relegated in the councils of the nations to the
status of a second-rate power had she not gone ahead with her
own atomic weapons project in 1946. Her new decision to
proceed with the development of the H-bomb will lend im-
measurable weight to her influence, and, just as her possession
of those great weapons constitutes a new badge of greatness in
the sphere of power politics, so her achievements in the field of
atomic energy development for civil purposes give her a special
position in the more constructive world of peaceful endeavour.

The military reasons are self-obvious but there are several
aspects of them that deserve more careful analysis. Sir Winston

32

THE H-BOMB OUR SHIELD 23

Churchill, always a man of great prescience in such matters,
asserted that during the immediate post-war period it was
possession of the bomb that kept the Russians out of Western
Europe. The true nature of Russian intentions at that time
must remain for the present, and may ever remain, a matter of
conjecture. The deterrent was certainly there, and the Russians,
through their agents, were in a good position to know that the
Americans could have gone on dropping atomic bombs at the
rate of several a month as new material was produced.

Many will think that it was undesirable that any one country
should have been placed, as America was, in the position of a
"super-power" possessing a weapon that would have allowed
her to impose her wishes on the rest of the world. We may
certainly be glad that this power was not placed alone in the
hands of our enemies.

There is no doubt that when the Russians, too, had the bomb,
Britain could not afford to remain sandwiched and powerless
between two great nations of such widely differing ideologies.
Without atomic weapons, her fleet, her air force and her, by
conventional standards, well-equipped army were a sheer
waste of money. They were too big for policing duties but too
small to constitute a major deterrent.

The successful testing of the first British atomic weapon in
the Monte Bello Islands in 1952 was an event of the greatest
importance, notwithstanding attempts that were made in
various parts of the world to overlook the event or to play it
down. It immediately placed Britain in a new category.
Because of the effective way in which she had prevented other
nations from learning the real extent of her potential, it gave,
at least in theory, a single one of her aeroplanes the hitting and
deterrent power of a whole score of her i,ooo-bomber raids
over Germany. I say "in theory" because there was still a long
way to go between the explosion at Monte Bello of an infernal
machine the size of a suburban bathroom and the development
of a reliable atomic weapon of reasonable dimensions that
could be dropped from our fastest aeroplanes, fired possibly
from long-range guns of our field armies and battle fleets, and
carried to targets many hundreds of miles away in the war-
heads of guided missiles, There was a long way to go, too,

24 ATOM HARVEST

between the extraction of sufficient material from a single bomb
and the manufacture on an industrial scale of quantities suffi-
cient to equip our armed forces. Exactly how far Britain has pro-
gressed along that road, and the Russians too for that matter, is
as uncertain as the undeclared hand of an astute poker player.
The position with regard to the hydrogen bomb is still more
obscure.

The Statement on Defence published in February 1955 con-
firms that the United Kingdom has the ability to produce such
weapons and "after fully considering all the implications of
this step the Government have thought it their duty to proceed
with their development and production".

The British weapon designers, we have been told by Mr.
Gordon Dean, one-time chairman of the United States Atomic
Energy Commission, "are of the very best" and they are
backed by an equally efficient production organisation. True,
their operations have been limited in scope by the smaller
resources that Britain could afford. But tests at Monte Bello
and Emu indicate that a great deal of progress has been made
and much money saved by intelligent improvisations.

It is typical of the change in strategy brought about by the
H-bomb that its use as a deterrent has almost completely
effaced the question of its application as a field weapon,
although, in fact, field armies have never been backed up by
or had to face so devastating an arm. The effect of the fission
bomb on field operations should not be exaggerated. While it
would undoubtedly achieve complete annihilation of troops
and installations at ground zero, the point on the ground
nearest the explosion, its effects on a well-dispersed army would
be limited to a few brigades in the immediate area.

There are no such limitations when the H-bomb is used. It
would need to be equated, not against brigades, but against
divisions and army corps. Large regions, tens of thousands of
square miles, of combat area would be temporarily paralysed
for friend and foe by the need for exploratory operations to
detect the extent of lethal contamination.

Nevertheless, its effects on battle operations fade into in-
significance when compared with those of its use as a deterrent
or retaliatory weapon against the home base.

THE H-BOMB OUR SHIELD 25

I asked Professor Joseph Rotblat of St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, London, what the use of such a weapon on a British
target would mean. Rotblat, a Pole by birth, was a member of
the British war-time atomic weapons team at Los Alamos. At
the end of the war he dropped weapons work to devote himself
to the peaceful exploitation of atomic energy.

"Just imagine an H-bomb bursting over London", he told
me, "and translate to Britain the information gained by the
Americans about fall-out, that is the settling of explosion
debris, in the 1954 Bikini thermonuclear test". He paced up
and down a relatively large study that nevertheless looked small
by reason of the vast number of books and periodicals and
gadgets that filled it. " If such a weapon exploded over London
when a wind from the south-east was blowing, cities like
Birmingham and Coventry would be showered with radio-
active dust that would amount to a lethal dose within two and
a half hours from the time that fall-out started."

Rotblat explained the implication of figures collected by
boats, aeroplanes and balloons in the Pacific. "It doesn't end
there", he went on. "In Liverpool and Manchester about ten
per cent of all the people exposed in the open for thirty-six
hours or more might die."

He emphasised that the figures applied only to people who
did not take shelter. The walls of an ordinary building, he told
me, would cut down radiation level by one-half, and a base-
ment shelter with about two feet of earth covering it might
reduce the dose to one-hundredth for people who were pre-
pared to remain inside for a day or so.

For them, however, as for everyone else, there would always
be hazards other than from radiation outside. Particles of
contaminated matter could be inhaled or ingested and some
would inevitably concentrate in organisms of the body, par-
ticularly in the thyroid gland or bones, where they might stay
for a long time.

Rotblat broke off for a moment to answer one of the bank
of four telephones at the edge of his desk. "Excuse me a
moment," he said, and went into his workroom next door where
two white-coated girls were slowly turning the delicate micro-
meter screws on the turntables of powerful microscopes. A

26 ATOM HARVEST

research worker had come in to query with him a matter con-
cerning a new atom-splitting machine, known as a linear
accelerator, the most powerful of its kind in any hospital in the
world, that had been installed at his suggestion in a new and
heavily protected underground laboratory in the building next
door.

"Where were we?" he asked, as he apologised for the inter-
ruption. I reminded him that we had spoken of contaminated
material that might enter the body by eating and breathing.
" Plants and animals breathe and eat, too", he went on.
" Everywhere over an area of thousands of square miles will be
covered in a thin layer of radioactive ash. We may not see it,
and the soil in any case will soon absorb it, but the story will
not end there for plants will soon be feeding on it. Contamina-
tion from this source might reach us either directly or via meat
or milk from grazing animals or through fish caught in an area
of contaminated sea." The latent effects of these internal radia-
tions are likely to be far more serious, he told me, than any of
the immediate ones. Since prevailing winds at high altitude
are from the west, the fall-out effects on London might be
equally disastrous if a bomb burst as far away as Bristol.

The Defence White Paper has stated what this may mean in
terms of daily life. Large tracts would be devastated and
rendered uninhabitable. Essential services and communications
would suffer widespread interruption. In affected areas central
and local governments would be put partially or wholly out of
action, and industrial production, even where plant and build-
ings remained, would be gravely affected by the disruption of
power and water supplies and by the interruption of the normal
interflow of materials. There would be serious problems of
control, feeding and shelter. Public morale would be most
severely tested. "It would be a struggle for survival of the
grimmest kind."

These ghastly results of thermonuclear warfare are now well
known. The better known they are, the less likely, perhaps,
countries will be to court war. But the annihilating and
catastrophic effects of such weapons on any Power, however
great its potential, provide at the same time the greatest argu-
ment for their surprise use by a Power without scruples. The

THE H-BOMB OUR SHIELD 27

might of these weapons is such that in any war the outcome
of the first exchanges would be of critical importance, and
tremendous advantage would accrue from the first use. For an
enemy who is determined that he could gain most from war, the
argument in favour of their use to initiate hostilities is obvious.

We have to face the fact that such an enemy, remembering
the tremendous success the Japanese achieved at Pearl Harbour,
might well decide to try and profit from the weapon of surprise
and attempt to deal at the outset and without warning a blow
that would cripple our deterrent forces. It therefore becomes
the task of the Allied Strategic Air Force to satisfy themselves
and at the same time prove to the rest of the world that their
power to hit back could not be effectively interfered with.

We have to plan for the contingency that might arise if the
fear of deterrent failed, as fail it might if an enemy thought that
a sudden and severe blow could sweep away the deterrent
force. We have to be sure that if aggression of this sort did take
place, we would still be in a position to deal a crippling counter-
blow at capital cities and other centres of communication and
mobilisation, at concentrations of industrial power and ports,
and be sure that we could do this in the face of any anti-aircraft
measure that might be used against us.

Britain's defence policy is based, too, on the fact that we
must be prepared to go one step further and demonstrate that
we have both the will to survive and also the power, with our
Allies, to achieve victory. In this important aim nuclear
weapons have a further importance to Britain as an "equalising
factor". Ours is a country which, for both reasons of manpower
and economics, must rely on the efficiency and high fire-power
rather than on quantities of weapons. Neither our financial
position nor our industrial potential permits us to pay our way
in the competitive peace-time world, and still maintain vast
fleets of aeroplanes and ships and great land armies.

The countries controlled by the Communists, in addition to
the new weapons, atomic and H-bombs, and long-range
rockets that they are now developing, have, of course, vast
conventional forces. They have a large and growing navy, vast
numbers of aeroplanes of high quality, and land forces numeri-
cally far stronger than anything we have ourselves. British

28 ATOM HARVEST

intelligence sources estimate that the Soviet Union, with its
Eastern Europe satellites, have some six million men under
arms, backed by numerous reserves. On the German front the
Soviet army could be increased to well over a hundred divisions
within thirty days. Against such a numerical preponderance
nuclear weapons offer the West a unique and indispensable
answer.

If war were forced upon us, and God forbid that it should
be, then our forces, and in particular our land armies, could
only operate in conditions which forced the enemy to disperse
and limit his numbers. It is hard to imagine how a large land
army could operate and be maintained and supplied in the field
in the face of nuclear bombardment. It is hard, too, to imagine
great air fleets ever attempting attack in the face of atomic
anti-aircraft weapons.

While this use of atomic weapons in an anti-aircraft role has
still to be further explored, it has certainly been considered
seriously in the United States. British and Canadian experts
were allowed to witness the testing of such a weapon in Nevada
in April 1955. The threat of H-bomb weapons has brought the
employment of atomic anti-aircraft weapons much closer.
Were it only known that a particular plane or formation of
planes was carrying against us an H-bomb, capable of elimi-
nating in one blow an area the size of London and of contami-
nating an area of country width, there would seem to be no
doubt that use of atomic weapons to destroy it would be a
gamble well worth while. Single intruder aircraft should fall an
easy prey to guided missiles, however, and one of the most
useful roles of an atomic anti-aircraft weapon may easily be
that of forcing an enemy to forsake formation attacks and adopt
tactics that are more favourable to guided-missile defence.

There is, of course, even in the weapons field an economic
factor to be taken into consideration. The late Senator Brien
McMahon in an historic address to the U.S. Senate some years
ago, while he was chairman of the Congressional Atomic
Energy Committee, told them that atomic bombs and shells
would soon be produced more cheaply than tanks and would
be a better economic proposition than conventional explosives,
having in mind their greater destructive power. He saw them

THE H-BOMB OUR SHIELD 2Q

being employed by ships, by artillery men of land armies, in
guided missiles both defensively and offensively, and, of course,
as a means of propulsion. He prophesied that atomic weapons
used in this way would be far cheaper than their well-known
counterparts, the conventional explosives RDX and TNT.

Senator McMahon, of course, had all the facts at his disposal
and undoubtedly knew what he was talking about. But even
the layman, who knows nothing of the cost of producing fissile
material needed for a single weapon, can form a pretty good
idea of the wisdom of the Senator's statement when he considers
other factors that are inextricably related to the argument.

Let us for argument's sake suggest that an atomic bomb
produced on an industrial scale costs the exaggerated sum of
-i million and try comparing it with the cost of thousands of
four-engined bombers that would be needed to deliver an
equivalent blow. Imagine not only the cost of the petrol or
kerosene they would use in the journey there and back, but
also the cost of all the fuel used in training flights of the crews
beforehand; the effort of training the men not just to fly their
planes but right through their schooling; the cost of ammunition
fired by them in their own defence on the way over; the cost of
men who never come back.

Compare it, instead, if you like, with the cost of thousands of
guns that would normally be required to deliver a crippling
blow against armies massed for battle in the field, of the
25-pounder cannon placed wheel-to-wheel in the British desert
assault on the German and Italian lines at El Alamein, backed
up by hundreds of medium and heavy guns and a continual
stream of light and heavy aircraft; consider the men and
materials that needed to be distributed along the coast of Britain
to meet the possible invasion by Hitler during World War II
at a time when those forces were so badly needed elsewhere.

In thinking of the uses of nuclear anti-aircraft weapons,
consider, too, the fact that German heavy anti-aircraft guns
during the war brought down on an average only one aircraft
for every 50,000 shells fired by their land batteries.

It is always difficult to place a monetary value on any new
development, particularly when it is of a military nature. Dr.
Hafstad, director of reactor development in the U.S. Atomic

3O ATOM HARVEST

Energy Commission, once told the Institute of Aeronautical
Sciences there that it was as difficult to place a current value
on the atomic bomb as it was to place a value on a single
Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. Hafstad did a calculation that
suggested an order-of-magnitude estimate of its worth at the
time of Hiroshima. At that time America's daily war expendi-
ture was over 100 million a day. If the use of atomic weapons
had shortened the war by only ten days, he reckoned, the value
of over 500 million could be put on each of the bombs used
over Japan, thus providing a figure sufficient to write off the
total incurred cost of the war-time Manhattan District Project.

When we begin to assess the military value of the atom bomb
in terms of its human life and real estate destructive power, the
situation becomes out of hand. An ordinary atom bomb might
destroy six square miles of city. While no reliable values are
available, and they would in any case vary tremendously from
place to place, it can be seen that in atomic weapons we have
something which on purely economic grounds is far more
significant than anything in the past.

It would be a mistake, however, for any Power to assume
that development of such weapons by the West infers a desire
and intention to attempt a conquest of the rest of the world.
The H-bomb is a punishing weapon, a damaging weapon. It
can hope to deter, and if it fails in this object it can retaliate
and neutralise lines of communication. It could wipe out an
invasion force before it left the enemy shore and could certainly
make a sea crossing impossible, but it could never occupy a
country and it has no power to consolidate advantages gained
or damage done.

Nor should we lull ourselves into feeling that we have and
will always have a better bomb than those of the enemy. It
may well be that at present we have, but complacency of this
sort should be tempered with the memory that it was probably
the Russians and not the Americans who produced the first
"dry" H-bomb, and that the American fusion weapon now used
almost certainly follows certain important principles first put
to the test by Russia.

The Americans have demonstrated their ability to mass-
produce quickly the ideas of the scientists, and the effort they

THE H-BOMB OUR SHIELD 3!

have devoted to the development of nuclear weapons has almost
certainly placed them in the position of temporary superiority.
The next stage is one of saturation, where the mere numerical
superiority of one side over the other in the possession of these
weapons becomes of purely academic interest in face of the power
even of the weaker side to deliver a crushing blow.

To assume that the present weapon designs represent the
ultimate, the final result of man's destructive genius, would be
to ignore history. We would be just as blind, if we did that, as
would have been the people living in the days of the Black
Prince, had they assumed that gunpowder and leather-barrelled
cannon represented the acme of human achievement.

[3]

Energy Spells Prosperity

PEACE-TIME applications of atomic energy are, if anything, of
greater importance to Britain than those of the military field.
In the latter case she has always in the United States a stout
ally to rely upon, but in the competitive industrial field she and
the rest of the Commonwealth countries at present stand alone.
There is little doubt that our prosperity in the decades ahead
will depend just as surely on atomic energy as that of our
grandfathers and great-grandfathers depended on coal and the
steam engine.

From the earliest days of the industrial revolution steam
allowed coalmines to be drained and deepened. It lifted and
carried the products of those mines to the towns and cities. It
speeded up land travel, led to a revolution in shipping, per-
mitted mechanisation of the mills and the birth of heavy in-
dustry. Gradually in Britain as in other countries throughout
the world people became used to having steam to do their work
for them, either directly in the provision of motive power or
indirectly by the generation of electricity that could be piped
alike into home and factory. The industrial productivity of a
nation is directly related to the amount of energy in one form
or another which the individual worker can call upon in the
performance of his daily tasks. It has been called the "Age of
Power".

There is no doubt that in coming decades we shall hear more
and more of a further factor in industry known as " automation "
or automatic control. Most of us have seen examples of this
already. Many of us have gas or electric stoves in our homes

32

ENERGY SPELLS PROSPERITY 33

that are controlled by thermostats that regulate heat to provide
predetermined temperatures. We have seen street lights turned
on automatically at predetermined hours, and we may have
seen fruit canning, even complicated evolutions of car manu-
facture, carried out by extensions of the same principle.

All are examples of automation and all provide instances of
how energy is being turned on and off to carry out tasks for
man and allow him extra time in which to employ his energies
elsewhere. They all point to one important tendency of the
present age, the use of more and more energy per head of
population. Some idea of how steep that increase is may be
gained from the Central Electricity Authority's own figures.
They show how yearly consumption jumped from ninety units
per head in 1920 to 520 in 1940 and 1,100 in 1953.

There is, too, another factor we have not yet reckoned with,
but one which is vitally important to future generations, and
that is the fact that coal, oil and natural gas are all important
starting-points for the synthesis of materials needed in every
field of our daily life. Dyes, medicines, plastics, including
artificial textiles and hundreds of thousands of other substances
that we take for granted, are all manufactured from by-
products of the purification of one or more of these three
raw materials. To burn them is to squander irrevocably a
valuable and irreplaceable heritage that we should hold in trust
for our children and children's children.

In Britain's own case, where there is little hydraulic power
and only minute quantities, as yet, of oil or natural gas, our
economy at present inevitably turns on coal. We use it at
present to run the greater part of our railways, to drive our
electric power stations, to heat our homes and to provide gas
for lighting and heating, alike for domestic and factory use, and
as coke it is an essential commodity in the production of another
vital commodity, steel. All our life, in fact, revolves around
coal in one way or another.

In the world as a whole there is no apparent shortage of it.
Figures assembled for the World Power conference held in
London in 1953 placed world resources at well over 6,000,000
million tons, and consumption at somewhere in the neighbour-
hood of 1,500 million tons a year. On such a basis it would
3

34 . ATOM HARVEST

appear that we had about 4,000 years' supply ahead at the
present rate of consumption.

The trouble is that these resources are not all where they are
most needed, and some countries that are sorely in need of it
have none at all. Thus, only fourteen nations produce as much
as 20 million tons of coal a year, and many of the countries that
have least need it most because of their rapid expansion of
industry and the urgent requirement to improve their living
standards.

Even those nations that have plenty are not without their
problems in getting it from the ground, as we in Britain know
only too well. There are probably more than 40,000 million
tons of workable coal lying underneath the ground in this
country and yet we still have difficulty in obtaining each year
the coal that we need for domestic purposes, for industry and
for the generation of electricity and gas.

Since the war the production of coal from deep mines has
increased from 175 million tons in 1945 to 214 million tons in
1954, but the demands of expanding home industries have been
rising even faster. In 1954 we were reduced to the point where
we had to buy 4 million tons from America. It was not, of
course, that the coal was not there. It was due partly to a new
attitude of mind but primarily to the fact that every year the
coal is harder to get. In the old days, very naturally, coal-
mining companies tended to exploit the richest deposits and
those that were nearest to the surface. As these deposits were
exhausted, the miners had to go deeper or, alternatively, the
consumer had to be content with poorer grades of coal. Among
the worst sufferers in this last respect were the power stations
that supply the country with electricity, which have had to
make do with progressively inferior qualities of coal fuel.

In some cases a modification of plant will permit this poorer
coal to be used economically, but there is one disadvantage of
using poorer coal which Sir Francis Simon has stressed and
that nothing can overcome, and that is the fact that because it
has a lower heat value more of it is needed to do a specific job.
Poorer coal, of course, is not cheaper to transport than the
better varieties and it costs at least as much and often far more
to obtain initially from the mine and to handle. Thus, as the

ENERGY SPELLS PROSPERITY 35

quality of the coal goes down, so the price goes up and the cost
of electricity and gas goes up with it.

Energy is such an important factor in industry that any
increase in its price and availability is likely to be reflected all
the way along the line, until it shows up inevitably in an in-
creased cost of living for every one of us. Even if such increases
in cost were acceptable, the estimated reserves in Britain only
amount to about 200 years' supply.

There is another factor to be reckoned with. As man is
forced to go deeper and deeper to win the coal he needs, so the
task of attracting labour to the mines gets even more difficult.
There is no disguising the fact that, notwithstanding all that
has been done to improve the lot of the miner, the job is not
popular. Incentive wages have to be offered and then the price
goes up again.

Even under ideal conditions coal is never burned economi-
cally. The best of our power stations only enable use to be made
of less than one-third of the available energy. In 1953, 7-3 per
cent of British power station capacity was wasting more than
80 per cent of the energy in the coal in the process of turning it
into electric current. Even after taking into account the most
modern stations, the average wastage of energy was still well
over three-quarters of the whole.

As far as the immediate future is concerned, the same efficiency
limitations will apply to nuclear power stations, since atomic
reactors must be regarded merely as furnaces used directly
or indirectly either to boil water or to heat a gas. The hot
steam or gas then gets rid of its energy by turning the rotors of
a turbine which in turn drives a dynamo.

The efficiency of this process depends, broadly speaking, on
the difference in temperature of the steam or gas when it enters
and leaves the turbine. This is another way of saying that it
depends on the amount of heat the gas has been able to use up
in its passage through the turbine.

The first nuclear power station to be built in Britain will
operate at only 20 per cent efficiency. This rather low figure
is partly because generating efficiency has been sacrificed in
favour of the overriding need for nuclear explosive.

The first of the strictly civil reactors, those built by the

36 ATOM HARVEST

Central Electricity Authority, will be a considerable improve-
ment on this and will operate at 25 per cent efficiency. This is
still well below that obtained in the latest coal-burning stations.
There are two reasons for the discrepancy. The first is that, for
metallurgical reasons, it is not possible to run the atomic
furnaces at the high temperatures operating in coal furnaces.
The present fuel rods would not stand up to it. The second
reason is that it is not convenient at present to boil the water
within the reactor, and an intermediate cycle has to be intro-
duced to transfer the heat from the pile itself to a point outside
the reactor where the water is turned into steam.

Now both these reasons are temporary limitations and there
is no doubt at all in the minds of nuclear engineers that it will
be possible soon substantially to raise the temperature within
the atomic furnace and also that it will be possible, by one
method or another, to get more of this heat transferred to the
turbine where it has to do its work. Costing is based to a certain
extent on a somewhat fictitious price for the by-product plu-
tonium. It is worth noting that, if the White Paper figures can
be accepted, then an atomic power station at 25 per cent
efficiency can still produce electricity slightly more cheaply
than it can be produced by coal-burning stations working at
higher efficiencies.

The advantages of atomic fuel are tremendous. Its volume
and weight are negligible compared with coal, while the heat
that can be produced in an atomic reactor is only limited by
the efficiency of the means of removing it, so that a pile no
bigger than a forty-gallon drum can easily deliver continuously
over a long period the energy needed by a small city.

Then again it is difficult to imagine the difference that wide-
scale use of atomic energy instead of coal would make to the
life of a country whose industrial areas rarely know the meaning
of a really clear atmosphere. Some of us may still live to see a
Britain completely devoid of " smog", in which trains, factories
and homes will all be powered, heated and lit by electricity
from power stations that receive their fuel, not daily in barges
or train loads, but in small covered lorries that drive up once
a week to deliver new elements and take away old ones for
processing.

ENERGY SPELLS PROSPERITY 37

Although atomic power stations will undoubtedly replace in
the end the conventional central stations with their ugly heaps
of coal waiting to be burned, there is a factor that will prevent
this from happening for many decades. This is the rapidly
increasing demand for more power. The consumption of
electricity in Britain is likely to be three and a half times the
1955 level in twenty years' time, and to meet this demand
installed generating capacity will have to be increased from
20 million to 60 million kilowatts.

This rate of increase is far greater than that at which industry
can design and build nuclear power stations in the initial
period, and the present atomic energy programme is unlikely
to meet much more than a quarter of this total generating
requirement by 1975. The contribution of these stations will,
however, be far more important to the country's economy than
this fraction suggests, for these stations will all be used to meet
the "base load", that is to say, they would, except for periods
of maintenance, be operating continuously and thus displacing
many coal-burning stations to the subsidiary role of running
for short daily periods to meet peak requirements.

Without nuclear power, consumption of coal for electricity
generation would, having in mind increased efficiencies that
are now being aimed at, increase two and a half times over the
next twenty years and reach 100 million tons yearly in the
i97o's. The Government's nuclear power programme should
now enable the demand for coal to level off, instead, at between
60 million and 70 million tons a year by the middle i96o's.

It will thus be seen that, as far as Britain is concerned, the
developments in the atomic energy field have come just in
time. Had we waited for America to release information on the
peaceful utilisation of atomic energy, we would have been ten
years too late.

[4]
The Atom is Split

THE chances of putting atomic energy to work in the service of
man were not very bright in the years previous to 1939 if the
published statements of the nuclear physicists themselves were
anything to go by.

It is true that as far back as 1904 the eminent British as-
tronomer Sir James Jeans had talked of the destruction of
matter to produce energy, and Prof. Einstein a year later had
calculated correctly the formula that would govern such a
process. It is also a fact that Sir Arthur Eddington, another
great theoretician, after talking to the British Association in
1920 of the way in which the stars obtained their heat, went on:
"We sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to
release and use it for his service."

In the early 1920*3, Aston's work had provided data from
which it was possible to calculate the energy released or ab-
sorbed in a nuclear change, although at the time he did it the
change could not be achieved experimentally. Had anyone
entertained the idea, it should have been clear from this work
that enormous amounts of energy would result from the
splitting of uranium or thorium.

Nevertheless, Lord Rutherford, the greatest of all the nuclear
physicists, the " father of atomic energy", had argued as late as
1925 that "the outlook for gaining useful energy by artificial
processes of transformation does not look promising", and in
1937 he reiterated this view. He based his argument then on the
fact that the only transformations which had been obtained
until that date, while each individually providing more energy

THE ATOM IS SPLIT 39

than was used to secure them, happened so rarely that when
you took into consideration all the energy that had been ex-
pended in unproductive reactions, in "near misses", the total
balance sheet was well "in the red".

He was not alone in his view. Dr. E. O. Lawrence, one of the
greatest American physicists, and a man who was destined to
take such a prominent part in later work, said in a lecture in
1938: "The fact is that, although we now know that matter can
be converted into energy, we are aware of no greater prospect
for destroying nuclear matter for power purposes than of cooling
the ocean . . . and extracting the heat for profitable work."

Then came the proof of nuclear fission, a process attended by
the liberation of large amounts of energy, and the picture
changed overnight. It was not so much the amount of energy
released by this process that was important, as the fact, soon
to be confirmed experimentally, that it was accompanied
always by the ejection of at least one and sometimes as many
as three neutrons, bulky neutral components of the atomic
nucleus, each capable of provoking further fissions in other
atoms. In this fact lay the possibility of the "chain" reaction.
Such a process would be able to sustain itself and spread like
fire. It was in this respect quite unlike the early "atom-chip-
ping" by Rutherford of substances like lithium which produced
only helium, a substance incapable of provoking any further
reaction.

The literature suggests that the uranium atom was first split
artificially in Rome by Enrico Fermi in 1934, without his being
aware of the fact, when he bombarded this substance with a
stream of neutrons. He then reported that the products of this
bombardment emitted rays of at least four different kinds,
suggesting the production of at least four new substances. Had
his instruments been more sensitive he would almost certainly
have discovered that there were many more products of the
reaction, but the work he was doing was already well in advance
of its time. As it appeared to him then, and there were some
good reasons for his argument, the newly produced activity was
due to the formation of heavier elements than uranium, the
ones we now refer to as the " transuranic " elements, by a
building-up process of neutron absorption.

4O ATOM HARVEST

Unfortunately, the techniques of the day were primitive and
the substances they were trying to identify were only produced
one atom at a time as a result of individual atomic collisions.
The amounts present were infinitesimal.

Fermi's results were studied and repeated by workers in
other countries, especially in the 1937 period, when there was
a great recrudescence of interest. Prof. Otto Hahn, working
with Dr. Lise Meitner in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in
Berlin, tried to identify the new products. So, too, in Paris, did
Prof. Joliot and his wife Irene, the daughter of Marie Curie. In
the Cavendish Laboratory Dr. E. Bretschcr, a senior research
worker from Switzerland, and Dr. Norman Feather and others
were working on the same problem.

"It was a shocking thing that physicists did not tumble to
fission before they did", said Dr. Feather, now professor of
physics at the University of Edinburgh. "It was perfectly clear
on the basis of measurements made by Aston, certainly in the
middle thirties, that the ordinary uranium nucleus was fat
enough to come apart and break into two fragments, nuclei of
roughly equal size. It was there, staring us in the face. The facts
were there, in the tables, for anyone to take note of. The sad
story is that no-one grasped it.

"The fact of the matter is, and it was discovered by two
Russian scientists in 1940, that if you leave uranium completely
on its own, shielded from any form of outside bombardment, it
will still undergo the same splitting process sooner or later
spontaneously. It is a very slow process, however, and for every
five million atoms that decay in the normal way only one under-
goes spontaneous splitting. Everyone knew about the normal
process of decay, by which uranium loses a small fraction of its
mass, and no-one thought of looking for anything else."

Dr. J. V. Dunworth, who now leads the Reactor Physics
Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Har-
well, and who shared a laboratory with Dr. Bretscher in those
days, told me how Dr. Bretscher, now a naturalised British
subject and head of the Nuclear Physics Division at the same
establishment, was bombarding uranium with neutrons. His
object was to discover evidence of element number 93 which
never yet been shown to exist but which everyone thought

THE ATOM IS SPLIT

ought to be formed by a building-up process when the neutrons
hit the uranium.

N3

N3

N3

The fission, or splitting, of one uranium 235 atom by a single neutron (N) pro-
duces between two and three fresh neutrons (Ni), any of which may cause
further fissions in other uranium 235 atoms to produce yet another genera-
tion of neutrons (N2). As each uranium 235 atom splits into two more or
less equal parts (FF) these " fission products " fly apart and tear their way
through adjacent materials. It is the friction needed to bring them to rest
which produces the heat exploited in atomic power stations.

Dr. Bretscher, who was well known in those days in the
Cavendish for his predilection for extremely short trousers, was
mystified, Dunworth recalls, by the fact that he was finding

42 ATOM HARVEST

traces of barium and iodine in his target. "The fact that they
should have been there at all made him very excited." We now
know that these two elements, each about half the mass of the
uranium atom, are among the commonest products of fission.

Another story which Cavendish workers of the period tell at
their own expense, and one which undoubtedly had its parallels
in many other famous laboratories elsewhere, is that of a ray-
detecting device, known as a counter, which " misbehaved"
itself. Counters, popularly known nowadays as "Geigers", are
used to detect rays produced when atoms break up or decay as
a result of collision or some natural process. The emission of
each burst of radiation causes a " pulse" of electricity to flow.

In the thirties the counters being used were still fairly primi-
tive and were constantly being modified by workers to meet
their own needs. The story goes that in one room in the Caven-
dish there was a research worker who, when he bombarded his
specimens of uranium with neutrons, periodically obtained
from his counter much larger responses than usual. In the light
of later knowledge there could be only one explanation of this
violent reaction. It was caused each time by the fission of an
atom of uranium.

The abnormal response was an indication of the exception-
ally large energy release that takes place when the atom splits
in half. To the worker concerned, who is now a physicist of
great eminence, the abnormally large pulse was a troublesome
phenomenon that interfered with the experiment. The counter,
so I am told, was quickly and effectively modified so that large
pulses could no longer be recorded !

The desire to interpret everything that was observed in
terms of the existing framework of knowledge was leading other
workers into trouble too. Prof. Otto Hahn and Dr. Fritz
Strassmann, working in Berlin in 1937 and looking for new
heavy elements, argued on the basis of their chemical analysis
that four of the mysterious substances obtained by the bom-
bardment of uranium were various forms of radium, a heavy
element of much the same weight as uranium. They based this
on the discovery of residues that behaved like barium, an
element chemically rather similar to radium.

Mme Joliot-Curie and a fellow worker, P. Savitch, who were

THE ATOM IS SPLIT 43

carrying on similar research in Paris, wrote a paper saying that
they thought that the chemical properties of the residue in-
cluded those of lanthanum, another element, of about half the
weight of uranium, but they too, trying to interpret their
results in terms of then-held theories, concluded that this
element must in fact be actinium, a substance chemically
similar to lanthanum, but much nearer in weight to uranium.

The Germans, who had all the time been expecting to find
elements formed that were heavier than uranium, were amazed.
"You can readily imagine Hahn's astonishment", we are told
by L. G. Cook, a Canadian radiochemist who was working in
Berlin at the time. "I well recall the day when he received the
French paper. His reaction was that it could not be and that
Curie and Savitch were very muddled up."

Hahn, however, drew the obvious conclusion. If one of the
ray-emitting substances turned out afterwards to be lanthanum,
the 57th element in the table of the elements, then it must have
been barium, the 56th element in the table, before it emitted
the ray that changed its identity. They went over their work
again and to their great surprise they discovered that this was
so. "We have come to the conclusion", they wrote, "that our
' radium isotopes' have the properties of barium." But they
still would not take the plunge and draw what to us now might
seem to have been a clear inference.

"As chemists", they said, "we should replace the symbols
Ra, Ac, and Th in our scheme (symbols, respectively, for the
heavy elements radium, actinium and thorium that they
thought they were producing) by Ba, La and Ce . . ." (sym-
bols for barium, lanthanum and cerium, elements of round
about half the weight of the uranium they had been bombard-
ing). But there was no precedent for such an idea in classical
thought, and apparently no theoretical justification, and they
would not accept it. "We cannot", they wrote, "decide to take
this step in contradiction to all previous experience in nuclear
physics."

The explanation, although no-one apparently recalled it at
the time, had been provided in 1934, shortly after Fermi's
original experiments. A German woman chemist named Ida
Noddack, discussing Fermi's work, had suggested a "new type

44 ATOM HARVEST

of nuclear disintegration brought about by neutrons". It was
conceivable, she argued, that in the bombardment of heavy
atomic nuclei like uranium " these nuclei break into several
large fragments".

The world of science seemed reluctant to draw conclusions
that are now destined to change the pattern of peace-time in-
dustry and way of life as thoroughly as they have already swept
away all our older concepts of war. Ida Noddack's explanation
was dismissed as the rambling of a sceptical chemist who just
did not want to believe the physicists.

When the explanation did come, it was not from Berlin but
from two scientists who had taken refuge from the Nazis abroad.
The first was Dr. Lise Meitner, who had for many years shared
with Hahn the direction of the radio-activity section of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Chemical Institute in Berlin and who had gone
a few months previously to Stockholm. The second was her
nephew, Austrian-born Dr. Otto Frisch, now Jacksonian Pro-
fessor of Natural Philosophy at the Cavendish. Frisch had left
Germany in 1933 and, after a short spell at the Imperial College
of Science in London, had accepted a post in Prof. Niels Bohr's
Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen.

Frisch was spending the Christmas of 1938 with his aunt in
Sweden, he tells me, when a letter arrived from Hahn telling
her of his results. Frisch, a short curly-haired man of fifty with
a serious demeanour that hides a live and typically Austrian
sense of humour, confesses that "it took my aunt a little while
to make me listen" as she started to tell him all about Hahn's
work. Eventually they got to arguing about the meaning of it
all. Up till then it had been accepted that you could, by bom-
barding an atomic nucleus like that of uranium, either chip
little bits off or add bits on. Very gradually it dawned upon
them that what was happening to the uranium nucleus in this
case was something quite different.

Frisch told me: "It looked as if the absorption of the neutron
had disturbed the delicate balance between the forces of at-
traction and the forces of repulsion inside the nucleus. It was
as if the nucleus had first become elongated and then developed
a waist before dividing into two more or less equal parts in
just the same way that a living cell divides/'

THE ATOM IS SPLIT 45

The striking similarity of that picture with the process by
which bacteria and other organisms reproduce themselves
caused Frisch to seek out an American biologist friend as soon
as he got back to Copenhagen to ask him what technical term
was used to describe this process. He heard that it was called
" fission" and immediately applied the same name to the
newly discovered nuclear phenomenon.

The importance of fission, as Frisch and Meitner were quick
to realise, lay in the fact that the combined weight of the pro-
ducts would be less than that of the original uranium nucleus.
If mass vanished, then, as Einstein and Aston had shown, it
could only result in the production of vast amounts of energy.

The task of composing a report of their discovery for publica-
tion was complicated and delayed by the fact that further
discussions between Frisch and Lise Meitner had to be con-
ducted over the long-distance telephone between Copenhagen
and Stockholm, and it eventually appeared in the British
scientific journal Nature on February n, 1939.

A great deal had been happening in the meantime, and with
bewildering speed. Niels Bohr was in America attending the
Washington meeting of the American Physical Society when
the Hahn and Strassman paper arrived. On January 26 he told
his friends there about it, and told them too of the picture
which Meitner and Frisch had formed to explain the German
results and about which Frisch had told him in Copenhagen.

The effect was electrifying. Some physicists went immediately
to their laboratories, a few of them even before Bohr had
finished speaking, to gain experimental proof. It took only a
few hours to demonstrate the large energy pulses produced by
the fission fragments.

The conclusions of Meitner and Frisch, arrived at over
Christmas, had been reported to Nature in a letter dated
January 16, which appeared in the correspondence columns
under the usual editorial disclaimer on February n. There
were no such delays in announcing to the world what appeared
to be the first experimental confirmation of their conclusions.
The daily press in America carried them within days.

It was not until a week or so later that Bohr received a letter
from one.of his sons in Copenhagen which reported that Frisch

46 ATOM HARVEST

had obtained similar experimental confirmation several weeks
earlier. "I had not written to him myself", says Frisch, " be-
cause I wanted to make sure and to follow up various questions.
I had, however, told Bohr's son of my results."

Bohr himself went to a great deal of pains to persuade the
American newspapers of his own laboratory's priority of dis-
covery, and it was probably as a result of that fact that Frisch
first became known in the United States as his son-in-law. As
Frisch himself points out, Bohr had no daughter and he was
himself unmarried.

The most immediately interesting feature of the new dis-
covery was the amount of energy released. It meant that a single
nucleus, so small that about one million million could be
packed side by side on a space one inch long, was releasing,
when it split, enough energy to make a small grain of sand do
an easily perceptible hop.

Several scientists were quick to point out that, when the
uranium atom split, some of the neutrons would find no home
with the fragments. There would be too many of them. Von
Halban, Joliot and Kowarski in France, and Anderson, Fermi,
Hanstein, Szilard and Zinn in the United States, confirmed it.
The big question now was whether these neutrons would be
produced fast enough and in sufficient numbers to split further
uranium atoms and keep the process going. If they were, then
a veritable " chain reaction" would be the result, and every
time a neutron split an atom it would produce a vast amount
of energy in the form of heat and radiation.

There were various methods of finding out. The French team
were first off the mark and took for convenience a uranium
compound that would dissolve in water and placed it in a large
vessel. In the centre they put a source of neutrons, and round
it they placed a number of devices that could detect the pres-
ence of neutrons and count them as they were formed. Then
they substituted for the uranium solution another that was very
similar but contained no uranium.

The results were conclusive. There were many more neutrons
in circulation, they found, when the neutron source was
placed in the solution of uranium. After making all the neces-
sary allowances for absorption and loss of neutrons in different

THE ATOM IS SPLIT 47

ways, the French team came to the conclusion that for every
neutron that splits a uranium atom, between three and four
additional ones are produced in the splitting process.

Confirmatory tests were carried out elsewhere and soon
showed that the French results, though basically correct, were
unduly optimistic. There was in fact no fixed number of
neutrons produced by fission.

It took several years of painstaking work in many labora-
tories to discover that the average number of neutrons produced
in each fission of uranium was 2' 5. The results already ob-
tained were enough for the French workers. They showed that
if you bombarded uranium with slow neutrons you produced
a new generation of fast ones. The French scientists knew that
graphite, heavy water and beryllium could be used to slow these
down. With commercial acumen that is rare in pure scientists
on this side of the Atlantic, they produced designs of both
heavy water and graphite reactors* to be used as sources of
power and hurriedly made the first application for patents of
chain-reacting piles, not very different in general principle
from those now operating in many parts of the world.

As may well be imagined, their action disturbed the tran-
quillity of the scientific world. It was so out of keeping with the
slow, precise and disinterested traditions of the very inter-
national nuclear "club" that many thought they had been
precipitate and a little unsporting. "After all," as one eminent
scientist told me, "no-one, including the French, knew that
it could work. There were many vital facts to be found out and
several years of hard and expensive work before anyone could
know the answer." The French reply to this was, that you
don't need to prove that a patent will work the day you make
initial application for it. That obligation only follows later on.

The French action did not immediately drive the atom ' c under-
ground". Scientists continued to meet and correspond and pub-
lish their results in the rapidly expanding field, until by general
agreement publication of results ceased in the interests of the
Allied war effort. This was to deprive the enemy of any benefit
he might otherwise derive from them and to prevent him from
seeing the way in which the Allies were thinking and working.

* Sec page 81.

48 ATOM HARVEST

The initiative in this move came primarily from a group of
foreign-born physicists working in America in 1939, and it was
at first only partially successful. Leading British and American
physicists agreed, and so did Niels Bohr. Joliot of France,
however, did not, and refused at first to co-operate, partly,
perhaps, because of the publication in the American Physical
Review of a paper that had been submitted before the agree-
ment had come into force. There is little doubt that the French
were even at this stage anxious to protect their commercial
interests. It was not going to be an easy field in which to
apportion credit or rights.

It has often been argued that some particular event, like the
first deliberate splitting of any atom by Rutherford in 1919, the
discovery of the neutron by Chadwick in 1932, the splitting of
uranium in 1938 by Hahn and Strassmann, the conclusions of
Meitner and Frisch, or the construction of the first chain-
reacting pile by Fermi in 1942, was the individual agent
responsible for triggering off the great succession of scientific
discoveries and technological achievements that have now
provided us with atomic bombs and nuclear power stations.

The truth is very different. Admittedly it was the good
fortune of Britain, with men like Dalton, to play a leading part
in the early formulation of atomic theory which continued up
to the end of the century, and to have made an outstanding
contribution through men like Rutherford, Chadwick, Soddy,
Aston, Cockcroft, the two Thomsons, Walton, Blackett, Powell,
and so many others who have continued that work in the
current century. But a glance at the scientific textbooks and
periodicals, so scrupulous in giving credit to earlier work, will
show that teams everywhere were engaged on these problems,
all the leading countries vying in friendly competition and
comparing notes and often asking or giving advice. Many
times the experimental results or theoretical ideas of one would
only achieve fruition through the complementary conclusions
of another team in a different country.

The German invasion of France soon changed all this,
however, and in the interests of the general war effort work on
the subject was concentrated in America, and it was the privi-

1<*orf nf t\it> TTnitprl Static airlpH hv aripntitfa frrmn Rritain

THE ATOM IS SPLIT 49

Canada, France, Italy and Germany, to make the outstanding
contribution to the great scientific discovery and technological
achievements of the war and immediate post-war period.

The part played by European scientists is not sufficiently
well known in America, and although a great deal of lip service
has been given to that help in official statements and in scien-
tific journals in America, the great proportion of the general
American public remains ignorant of the facts. Mr. Gordon
Dean, three years chairman of the United States Atomic Energy
Commission, was not exaggerating when, in his book Report on
the Atom, he wrote: "I sometimes think that we in America are
a little inclined to believe that each atom bears the inscription
'Made in the U.S.A.* except those that have been stolen from
us. In those cases the U.S.A. has been scratched out and the
letters 'U.S.S.R.' have been etched on."

" The myth", he said, " would run something like this : Atomic
energy was discovered and first developed in the United States
in secret during World War II. Although we are still ahead in
the field, the Russians, with the help of traitors, successfully
stole enough of our key secrets during the war to develop a
programme of their own and are now hot on our heels. Our
Allies, the British, because some of their scientists came over
to help us with our war-time programme, also know something
of these matters, but are actually running a very poor third."

There was a time when I would have thought this story
far-fetched. An experience I had one night in a Los Angeles
drugstore taught me that it is probably an understatement and
that the world of an American can be just as circumscribed and
self-sufficient as that of any Russian. The girl behind the
counter asked me how long I had been in the States. I told her
" Three days". She wanted to know where I came from, and I
told her I was from London. "You speak English very well
after only three days here", she told me.

So much for the English language. What about the atom?
Let us ask Dean. "Under no circumstances can it be said that
the atom is native-born American", he tells us. "The most that
can be said is that it is an immigrant of mainly European
lineage that has taken out its first papers over here." The pre-
cise date when the atom immigrated to the United States

50 ATOM HARVEST

would be placed by Mr. Dean at January 16, 1939, the date
when Niels Bohr told them Hahn and Strassmann had split the
atom.

In the light of subsequent events it is difficult to believe that
it was not in great measure due to the prestige of scientists
working in Britain and their confidence in the feasibility of the
bomb project that the American Government were persuaded
to embark on the programme when and on the scale that they
did. By the time that decision was taken, scientists in Britain
had already calculated within near limits the critical mass of
fissile material needed for such a bomb and had worked out the
outlines of the two main methods later used to produce atomic
explosive, that is to say the method of separating uranium 235
by the system of gaseous diffusion, and production of plutonium
by the process of transmitting uranium 238 in an atomic pile.

That work, as we shall see, had been started by a British
Committee under the chairmanship of Sir George Thomson,
now Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

[5]
Transatlantic Partnership

THE College of Corpus Christi is an ancient and distinguished
foundation. Its Gothic windows, battlemented tower and
friendly court of closely cut green grass date back to 1352.
Although the college borders on the town's main street, its
quiet exterior gives no hint of the industry within its many
rooms nor boasts the many distinguished scholars that have
left it to take their places among the country's honoured men.

In this self-effacing quality the college has much in common
with its Master. Always willing to help, ready with pencil and
paper to worry out a problem or test a theory, Sir George
Thomson nevertheless shuns personal publicity, but he will
willingly spend half an hour explaining to a layman in the
simplest language the significance of some scientific discovery
about which he has been consulted.

In 1939 Sir George was Professor of Physics at the Imperial
College of Science and Technology in the heart of London.
Like others working in the field, he had quickly grasped the
significance of the news from Germany. It was a situation, he
realised, that required immediate action.

There is nothing normally conspiratorial about him, as the
reader may have guessed, but even the quiet Sir George (he
was plain G.P. for George Paget then) said afterwards that he
felt "like a character in a third-rate thriller" on the day when,
early in 1939, having thought it all out and talked it over with
Sir Henry Tizard, head of his college, he went to the Air
Ministry and asked officials there for a ton of uranium oxide.
Of course, they wanted to know why. "G.P." told them of the

51

52 ATOM HARVEST

Berlin work, of the conclusions of Meitner and Frisch, and of a
letter that had just appeared in Nature telling of the experiment
of Halban, Joliot and Kowarski with the tank of uranium solu-
tion and how they found they got out more neutrons than they
put in.

The discovery, he told them, might be of the greatest military
importance. There were two possibilities, he said, from the
military point of view. The first would be the establishment of
an endless chain reaction, releasing energy in perhaps con-
trollable amounts as a source of power; the second was to
make the process to be so rapid that, to use his own words,
"a considerable fraction of the available energy is released
before the whole contrivance is blown to the four winds". The
second possibility would be an atomic bomb.

G.P. wanted the ton of uranium oxide, he told the Air
Ministry, because the data available was far from complete and
it would enable him to carry out experiments with Professor
Moon and others in the college. They would have liked
uranium metal, but at that time such a thing existed only as a
chemical curiosity.

G.P. got his uranium oxide all right, but the first experiments
were disappointing. They appeared to indicate that the chain
reaction, the first objective, could not be achieved at all with
uranium oxide unless large supplies of heavy water were avail-
able. There was hardly any heavy water in Britain. With ordi-
nary water or paraffin, the next best things, the reaction would
not work at all, they found, because all the neutrons were
absorbed by these substances before they could achieve their
effect. This seemed automatically to rule out the second possi-
bility, that of a bomb.

" If this conclusion now seems disgraceful blindness," says Sir
George, in retrospect, "I can only plead that to the end of the
war the most distinguished physicists in Germany thought the
same."

It was from Prof. Sir James Chadwick of Liverpool University
and from two refugee scientists from Germany that the first
workable idea for an atomic bomb came quite independently. In
March 1940, Dr. Peierls and Dr. Frisch, who had both come to
Britain from Germany, came to see Sir Henry Tizard, chairman

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 53

of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Warfare. Dr.
Peierls, now Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birmingham Uni-
versity, and Dr. Frisch pointed out that while there were ob-
jections to a bomb made out of ordinary uranium, the same
objections would not apply if the lighter uranium 235 were
used. A sub-committee of scientists was formed to go into
the matter and G. P. Thomson was put in charge of the
investigation.

Every committee must have a name by which it can be
recognised, and the same applies even if it is only a sub-com-
mittee. It must be a name which, especially in a case like the
present one, tells no-one what it is up to. Most committees take
their names from their chairmen, but Thomson's name might
have given the enemy a clue. The " cover name" chosen for
the uranium sub-committee would have defeated even the
historians. Its members christened it "Maud".

Sir George tells me that it all started with a telegram that
Dr. Frisch had received about that time from Niels Bohr in
Copenhagen. Denmark had just been overrun by the Germans.
The latter part of the telegram ran, "TELL COCKCROFT AND
MAUD RAY KENT". Frisch knew of no such person, nor did John
Cockcroft. Between them they concluded with great but mis-
guided ingenuity that, allowing for a certain amount of garb-
ling, the words MAUD RAY KENT might be an anagram for
RADIUM TAKEN and have been intended to warn the British
that the Germans had confiscated the country's stocks of that
valuable and significant commodity.

"Years after the war", says Sir George, "I happened to
mention this to Niels Bohr and he told me the message had had
nothing to do with radium. There was, in fact, a lady of that
name who had stayed some time in Copenhagen before the
war and he wanted word sent to her friends." Needless to say
the message never reached them.

The ingenuity of a later generation of Civil Servants went
one better. Sir George heard afterwards that in the absence of
any other explanation the initials had been interpreted tenta-
tively as "Military Application of Uranium Detonation"!

There were a number of problems that the MAUD Com-
mittee needed to sort out. Uranium as it is found in nature is

54 ATOM HARVEST

a mixture of two kinds of atoms weighing, respectively, 235 and
238 units. Wherever it is found, whether as hard, dense grey
rock called pitchblende in the Belgian Congo or as bright
yellow carnotite in Colorado, the metal itself, whatever is in
combination with it, will always contain these two sorts of
uranium atom. They will always be, too, in the same fixed
proportions of about 99 -3 per cent of the heavier 238 variety
and 0'7 per cent of the lighter 235 form. Because they behave
in exactly the same way chemically, there is no hope of separ-
ating them by any method of chemical reaction.

But the bomb suggested by Chadwick and by Frisch and
Peierls demanded that only the lighter, rarer variety be used.
Unless the two forms could be separated on an unheard-of scale
there could be no bomb of uranium 235. Dr. Peierls offered to
tackle this problem with Dr. Francis Simon.

A team under Professor Haworth of Birmingham University
undertook to investigate related chemical problems, and the help
of Imperial Chemical Industries was enlisted. Chadwick agreed
in the meantime to go carefully into the fundamental physics,
while another team, with Prof. N. Feather and Dr. E. Bretscher,
worked at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. One thing
they had to find out was whether, even if the right ingredient
could be manufactured in quantity, the reaction would proceed
fast enough to achieve the desired effect and not just result in
a "fizzle". They needed, for example, to calculate what the
chances were of the neutrons escaping from the mass of atomic
explosive before they had had a chance to collide with one of
the other nuclei of uranium.

They knew that if the right amount of nuclear material were
present it only needed one neutron to start a chain reaction
which would result in an atomic explosion. Perhaps the greatest
problem of all was that of discovering just how much uranium
would be required in the bomb.

The nucleus itself occupies a minute fraction of the whole
space taken up by each atom, and they knew that if the amount
of uranium used were too small the neutrons formed by early
fissions would probably escape to the exterior through the open
spaces in surrounding uranium atoms without ever encounter-
ing another nucleus in which to provoke further fission.

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 55

As the radius of any sphere gets bigger, it is a simple mathe-
matical fact that the volume grows more quickly than the
surface of the sphere. This meant that a smaller proportion of
the neutrons would be able to find their way out through the
surface of a large sphere than would through the surface of a
small one. If the sphere were too small the leakage would be
too great to permit a chain reaction to build up ; if it were too
big, one stray neutron would suffice to set off a chain of reaction
that would result in a full-scale atomic explosion.

To make a bomb that would be quite safe until the moment
of detonation it would be necessary to calculate theoretically
the " critical" mass needed to provide an explosion, and then
make up this amount in two or more fractions that would only
be brought together at the vital moment.

While this work was proceeding in Britain, the French had
been carrying out experiments of their own on the non-
explosive applications. When the Germans invaded France their
work would have been brought to an end but for the timely
activities of a modern edition of the "Scarlet Pimpernel" in
the person of the late Earl of Suffolk.

As scientific attache in Paris, he had compiled a list of 150
French scientists and technical men who ought to be smuggled
to Britain if Paris became endangered. Among them were
Halban (Joliot preferred to remain) and Kowarski. With them
they carried what must have been strangest of all the many
things salvaged from France at the time. It took the form of
thirty-six gallons of heavy water which they nursed like the best
Napoleon brandy.

It was a valuable consignment, well worth saving, for it
comprised most of the then stock of the entire world. Its loss to
the Germans was as important as its gain to ourselves. The Earl
of Suffolk was killed afterwards in a courageous attempt to
render harmless a German infernal machine. It was from Prof.
Halban that I heard the story one night in a dimly lit Mayfair
eating club.

Because of congestion on the roads and interrupted com-
munications, and also the reluctance of some of them to leavji
France, only about forty of the men on the Earl of Suffolk's^
reached Bordeaux, where arrangements had been m?^ &*

56 ATOM HARVEST

them to embark on an 8,000 ton collier, the Broompark. The cargo
was a motley one, says Halban. It included 2! million worth
of industrial diamonds and every British vehicle they could get
aboard.

Plans were immediately made to save the most valuable
items if the ship were sunk on its way across the Channel. The
heavy water, which had been ordered from Norway and flown
to France at Joliot's request in March 1940, was in twelve
sealed aluminium cans. The Earl, a romantic figure who had
once in his youth run away to sea and signed on as a ship's
carpenter, built a raft and the heavy water and diamonds were
lashed on top.

Halban tells me that the Earl of Suffolk and Kowarski then
drew up with him a " solemn agreement", which they all
signed, to the effect that if the ship were mined or bombed and
were in danger, any of them who survived would cut the raft
adrift and remain with it. If the ship were attacked by sub-
marine, since it was believed that the Germans were already
looking for them, they would see that the raft remained tied
to the Broompark when it sank. To increase their own hopes of
survival they donned the inner tubes of tyres stripped from
vehicles they had saved.

The Broompark, as fate would have it, reached Falmouth in
safety, although a neighbouring ship went up on a mine.
Halban and Kowarski, after preliminary negotiations to safe-
guard their rights to any new discoveries, were installed with a
young British research worker, Fred Fenning, in an annexe to
the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where Prof. Feather
was in charge. From that time on they took a leading part and
were a constant inspiration in the reactor side of the new
project.

In July 1940 the Americans were advised of British progress.
The information was passed on to them by Dr. R. H. Fowler,
a distinguished scientist then heading a mission in Washington.
Sir George Thomson tells me it was agreed that he should be
given all the data that had been collected up to that date so
that he could communicate it to the American Government.
The precedent so formed was followed, and the minutes of
MAUD were sent to Fowler on a number of occasions to be

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 57

communicated to the Americans, who by this time had their
own committee under Dr. Wyman J. Briggs, head of the Bureau
of Standards, and with Dr. George B. Pegram of Columbia
University as vice-chairman.

John Cockcroft came back early in 1941 from a visit to
America with an account of their work. It was mainly con-
cerned with the separation of uranium 235 from the unwanted
238. It was very much along the same lines as our own, he re-
ported, but perhaps not so well advanced. Fermi had just started
investigation of a pile system that depended on graphite instead
of heavy water, and was to operate two years later and provide
the world with the first chain-reacting pile in history.

The French team in Cambridge had meanwhile made an
important discovery. Using a suspension of uranium oxide and
heavy water in a spinning sphere that kept the powder well
mixed with the fluid, they performed late in 1940 an experi-
ment which provided for the first time clear evidence that in a
sufficiently large system a chain reaction would be possible.
Between three and six tons of heavy water, they found, would
be needed.

Their findings were reported to the United States, where
they were immediately pooh-poohed. Some of the criticisms
were quite childish. If the mantle of the late Lord Rutherford
had fallen on anyone's shoulders, it had fallen on those of Prof.
Chadwick. He was the man whose opinion would not be
doubted, and the Americans asked him to go down to Cam-
bridge to check the French claims. He reported that though the
accuracy might not be as high as was suggested, the general
import was quite convincing. It was not until eighteen months
later that foreign-born scientists, working in America, were
able to provide similar evidence, using graphite, and in America
due credit has never been accorded to the French for this work.
The Smyth Report, for example, makes no reference to it what-
soever. It was not without effect, however. The National
Defence Research Committee soon afterwards gave an order
for the design of a factory to produce heavy water in quantity.

About this time members of the British Mission in the United
States were invited to attend some of the meetings of the
N.D.R.C. sub-committee dealing with uranium, and the

58 ATOM HARVEST

Americans in their turn attended meetings of MAUD. It was
arranged that Dr. E. O. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner,
should carry out certain experiments on his atom-splitting
cyclotron, and that Dr. A. O. Nier should help by providing
a sample of separated uranium 235.

French interest in the chain-reacting pile was based on its
use as a source of energy, but a discovery by two American
scientists, McMillan and Abelson, published in 1940 for
all the world to see, gave the clue to a further possibility.
It suggested that a new element, plutonium, heavier than
uranium, would be formed when uranium 238 absorbed
neutrons. This building-up process, by competing with the
fission process for available neutrons, was obviously one of the
reasons why it had been so difficult to get a chain reaction to
take place, but to Cockcroft, Feather, Bretscher and others in
Britain it suggested a further atomic explosive, as good as
uranium 235, which, because it was chemically different from
uranium, might be far easier to separate out and purify than
were two substances that were chemically similar.

By the summer of 1941 the work of Sir George Thomson's
MAUD Committee was sufficiently advanced for an historic
report to be made. There were two main findings. The first
dealt with the possibility of a bomb made of uranium 235, and
the second with the production of power and plutonium in a
heavy water reactor. It also included designs for a separation
plant to produce uranium 235, with a rather optimistic esti-
mate of the cost of a full-scale plant to produce a bomb a week.

The work on the large-scale isotope separation was in the
hands of Sir Francis Simon, now Professor of Thermodynamics
at Oxford, who was responsible for the laboratory side, and
Professor Peierls in Birmingham, who was in charge of the theo-
retical aspects. Both groups worked in very close collaboration.

When Simon was asked to prepare a cost estimate for a full-
scale diffusion plant, he had to base it to a large extent on
guesswork. A gaseous form had to be used. The only known
volatile uranium compound, the hexafluoride known for short
as "hex", was only available in very small amounts, just enough
to measure its physical and chemical properties. There could
be no question of running an isotope separation on these

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 59

amounts, quite apart from the fact that no compressors or
barriers had at that time been developed for this highly cor-
rosive gas. The separation experiments had to be carried out

SEPARATED LIGHT
FRACTION (PRODUCT)

I" STAGE

SUPPLY OF NEW
MATERIAL.

Diagram A

iTO I" STAGE

I" STRIPPING
STAGE.

Diagram A, illustrating the principle used
in the process of gaseous diffusion employed
at Capenhurst to " enrich " uranium by
increasing the proportion in it of the lighter
isotope, uranium 235.

A single " stage " of the plant consists of a
rotary compressor, or pump, and a box
divided by porous membranes, the "holes
of which are so small that there are several
million of them to every square inch of
material. The 11235 atoms, being lighter
than those of 11238, move faster and tend
to pass more quickly through the membrane.
Because the separation is very imperfect it
must be repeated several thousands of times.
The effectiveness of the separation is further
increased by " re-cycling " as shown in
diagram B.

Diagram B

instead with a "model" system, a mixture of two heavy gases,
non-corrosive and relatively easy to separate and analyse. The
filter barriers, too, were only in the early stages of development

6O ATOM HARVEST

and guesses had to be made about what might be possible
later on.

These experiments, however, left the isotope separation
group confident that the diffusion process would be the best one
to separate the uranium isotopes on a large scale. It was also
clear that such a plant, with its thousands of stages, was going
to be extremely expensive, and it was probably the first time
that physicists had ever had to accustom themselves to the sum
of a million pounds as a unit of cost.

Sir Francis confesses that when it came to estimating for the
full-scale plant he was in a quandary. The possible spread of
costs was enormous owing to many uncertainties that were
unavoidable at that time; indeed, he thinks that, if he had
cautiously given figures approaching the upper limit, it would
have killed the diffusion project immediately. "I felt justified
in putting forward the lowest estimate which, under favourable
circumstances, might, in my opinion, have been achieved in
practice," he tells me, "and I am glad that I did so."

The MAUD Report went to the Hankey Committee, the
highest committee in the land on the military applications of
science. At the end of August, Lord Cherwell, whose duty it was
to keep the Prime Minister informed on all these and other
technical problems, reported the substantial progress that had
been made.

The general responsibility for scientific research under the
various technical committees lay with the then Lord President
of the Council, Sir John Anderson, later to become Lord
Waverley. Having this in mind, the Prime Minister on
August 30 wrote the following minute :

Gen. Ismayfor Chiefs of Staff.

Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosive I
feel we must not stand in the way of improvement and I therefore
think that action should be taken in the sense proposed by Lord
Cherwell and that the Cabinet Minister responsible should be Sir
John Anderson. I shall be glad to know what the Chiefs of Staff
think.

The Chiefs of Staff replied recommending immediate action
with the maximum priority. A decision was taken in favour of

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 6l

building a pilot plant for uranium production in Britain, with,
if possible, a full-scale plant in Canada.

Sir John Anderson, who had now the ministerial responsi-
bility for putting this decision into action, had had a most dis-
tinguished and varied career, but there was nothing on the face
of it to suit him for his present task. Born in July 1882, and edu-
cated at George Watson College and the University of Edin-
burgh, he had gone to the Colonial Office in 1905, where his
ability was quickly appreciated. His first big responsibility
came with his appointment to the Ministry of Shipping in the
vital period towards the end of the First World War when our
food supplies were almost at the mercy of the German U-boats.
In 1932 he had been appointed to the Governorship of Bengal,
and when he returned in 1938 he successfully stood for election
as Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities and was
made a Privy Councillor.

The most relevant item in Anderson's career, however, was
a period about which few people except Mr. Churchill knew.
It lay in the world of science. By a curious coincidence Anderson
had played his own part in the early nuclear investigations at
the very start of the century, when the excitement first began.

In 1903, after gaining his Edinburgh degree, he went to
Leipzig to do post-graduate research under Professor Ostwalt
in the Physical Chemical Institute.

Professor Ostwalt himself had become alive to the interesting
possibilities opened up by the work of Becquerel, discoverer of
radioactivity, and the Curies just before the close of the century.
He wanted to start up work in his own laboratory and he asked
Anderson to initiate and take charge of this work.

That early experience of the special problems involved in
atomic energy work, and the special "feel" that it gave
Anderson for the scientists' point of view, were going to stand
Britain in good stead in the years that lay ahead, and it ex-
plained why, when the time came soon afterwards for the
Cabinet to be reorganised, for Anderson to become Chancellor
of the Exchequer, and for another minister as Lord President
to take over the general responsibility for science, he was asked
by Mr. Churchill to continue his responsibility for the atomic
bomb project.

62 ATOM HARVEST

Wanting to know more about those early days, I went to see
Lord Waverley. As chairman of the Port of London Authority
controlling the largest expanse of docks in the world, he occu-
pies a finely panelled and beautifully furnished office in their
headquarters on Tower Hill, overlooking the Tower of London
and Tower Bridge. In an ante-room nearby, where I waited,
there were large painted metal maps of the port showing where
every ship, represented by small magnetic models, was berthed
in the many basins.

Waverley himself was dressed in a rather old-world fashion,
quite unfamiliar in the atomic age. He wore a jacket of black
doeskin cloth and stiff white winged collar. A pearl tiepin held
his finely checked grey tie in place. The tempo of our conversa-
tion was set by the slow and measured tones with which he
himself spoke all the time, emphasising each word carefully.
On every occasion when he mentioned the names of foreigners
or used foreign words, he pronounced each syllable with the
greatest possible care and correctness.

He seemed to recall his early Leipzig days with a great deal
of pleasure. "We were, of course, only interested", Lord
Waverley told me, "in the scientific aspects of nuclear research.
Our interest was chiefly in the newly discovered phenomenon
of radioactivity. What they had asked me to do was to investi-
gate the various forms of radioactivity associated with uranium."

The work involved a good deal of chemical separation. One
of the processes which Lord Waverley used in those early days
was due soon to achieve a new significance in the British post-
war programme. It was the method of extracting uranium by
dissolving its compounds in ether. This method was adopted,
as we shall later see, in preference to one of precipitation which
had been favoured by the Americans in the production of
plutonium.

I asked Lord Waverley what his first reactions were on being
asked to take over the new task. He had shown, it seems, im-
mediate interest in the idea. "My first act", he told me, "was
to appoint a consultative council." This was composed of Sir
Henry Dale, President of the Royal Society, Lord Hankey, and
later Mr. R. A. Butler, chairman of the Scientific Advisory
Council of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Appleton, Secretary of the

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 63

Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Lord
Brabazon, Minister of Aircraft Production, and Lord Cherwell,
who was Mr. Churchill's personal adviser on scientific matters.

"The next move was to appoint someone to take executive
control", he went on in his slow, measured speech. "On the
advice of members of my council I decided to ask the late Sir
Wallace Akers, who had been concerned with the secret work
that I.C.I, had been doing for the Government in connection
with the problem of isolating the active 235 component of
uranium. "

Akers, an industrialist of outstanding ability with a gift for
understanding and getting on with people and a wide know-
ledge of research techniques and plant construction, had just
been elected to the main board of I.C.I, as director responsible
for research. I.C.I., who were destined to supply the project
with a dozen or more of its senior men later on, and had already
lost many to the munition factories, generously gave up Akers
and allowed him to take Mr. M. W. Perrin as his chief assistant
and deputy.

Although Perrin was to take a leading part in the war-time
programme and continued as scientific " chief-of-staff " to Lord
Portal in the four formative years of the project immediately
following the war, he was never a man to seek the limelight.
There must be few people in the country, however, who have
not used domestic articles made of the hard, waxlike and almost
incorrodible polythene that he was in great measure responsible
for developing while at I.C.I.

To ensure that Akers had at his disposal all the laboratory
facilities and services that he needed, the atomic project was
made into a new and, to all intents and purposes, autonomous
division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

The normal procedure within the Civil Service, of course, is
for a division of that sort to deal with the responsible minister
only through the Permanent Secretary. Akers and Perrin re-
sisted this procedure successfully and, right from the start, were
given access to the Lord President in all matters concerning
the project, so that there was continual movement between
their office in 16 Old Queen Street, which was then the
headquarters of the Department of Scientific and Industrial

64 ATOM HARVEST

Research, and Lord Waverley's office round the corner in
Whitehall.

The new division had to have a name and was rapidly
christened the " Directorate of Tube Alloys", or "T.A.". The
name soon became so firmly associated with atomic energy
work that in America many scientists and engineers talked of
"tuballoy" as a code word when they meant uranium. Perrin,
who is now chairman of The Wellcome Foundation, told me
how the division came to get its name. The story reflects the
sound judgement that Lord Waverley showed in so many
directions.

Akers and Perrin had been discussing the question of a name
together. They wanted one that gave away nothing but was
high-sounding and urgent enough to impress the firms with
which they had to deal. It was at a time when the outstanding
success of the German armoured divisions a year before in
France had suddenly made the country extremely " tank consci-
ous ". They hit upon the name "Tank Alloys".

Shortly afterwards Sir Wallace Akers went to see Waverley
and asked him what he thought of the name. "At that time we
had pinned our faith on the diffusion process for the separation of
uranium 235", he says. The plant required involved a great
agglomeration of tubes made from a special alloy capable of re-
sisting the corrosive effect of 'Hex'. It was for that reason that
I suggested Tube Alloys as a generic term."

The new directorate was set up in September 1941, and at
the same time a technical committee was set up under the
chairmanship of Akers on which sat scientists who were direct-
ing the various spheres of work. Its members at the start were
Sir James Chadwick, Professor Peierls, and Drs. Halban, Simon
and Slade. Later they were joined by Professors Oliphant,
Cockcroft and Feather.

By this time there had been a good deal of reorganisation in
Britain. The immediate needs of the war effort radar, tele-
communications, precautions against mines, the development
of better tanks, anti-tank guns, and of course aircraft had
made a heavy call on scientific and industrial resources, and
a large proportion of the physicists were already engaged on
the various tasks. In the atomic field a choice clearly had to be

4 . Calder Hall, the uoild's hist Luu<- -(..K atomic pouri station nearing com-
pletion. On left and nearest the camera is one reactor. The common hall for
generating equipment is in the centre and beyond arc the second reactor and a
water-cooling tower.

j. The "cooling pond" at the Windscale plutonium factory where fuel elements,
highly radioactive after being used in the reactors, are allowed to remain lor some
months to lose some of their activity.

ll

-

rf

) at _H

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 65

made and the decision was taken to concentrate on a few
"super priorities". They were:

Obtaining essential nuclear physical data.

Theoretical investigations into the chain reaction in an

atomic bomb and the dimensions and design of the bomb

and its blast effect.
Development of prototype plant for the enrichment of

uranium 235 explosive by gaseous diffusion.
Investigation of atomic reactor systems, especially those

using heavy water.
Manufacture of the uranium fuel elements and the heavy

water that would be required by such reactors.

The Americans, as has been said, had been kept fully in-
formed of the British progress and views on the atomic bomb
project. As far back as December 1940, Fowler had passed over
to E. O. Lawrence a letter from Gockcroft in which the view,
already put forward by Feather and Bretscher in Cambridge,
was expressed that plutonium could be used as an alternative
explosive to uranium 235 and pointing out that it might be
easier to manufacture.

Professor Bainbridge of the American National Defence Re-
search Committee (NDRC) had come over to England in April
1941, and Professor Lauritsen, also a member of NDRC, in
July of the same year. Their visits had been on general scientific
matters, but both had, in the spirit of share and share alike,
been invited to attend meetings of the MAUD Committee,

They had been told, too, of Professor Chadwick's strong con-
viction that a bomb of great destructive power could be made
from uranium 235 and of the opinion of the whole British group
that the separation of uranium 235 on the necessary scale was
feasible.

The British had emphasised the urgency of the project by
pointing out that the Norwegian heavy water plant at the
Norsk Hydro was capable of producing several quarts of heavy
water a day, and also the fact, learned by our intelligence de-
partment, that the Germans had given orders for considerable
quantities of paraffin, a highly significant substance, to be
manufactured from the heavy hydrogen thus obtained.
5

66 ATOM HARVEST

There was no doubt that the considered opinion of the
MAUD Committee, which included almost all the leading
physicists in Great Britain either as members or consultants,
greatly impressed the Americans. It strengthened the hands of
those who already believed in the project and was useful in
persuading men in authority that they ought to take the matter
seriously.

Up till late 1941 the American National Academy of Sciences
had made two reports on the uranium problem. Neither of them
was very cheerful. The first, in May 1940, mentioned radio-
active poisons, atomic power, and atomic bombs, but placed
emphasis on power. The second had stressed the importance of
the new work on plutonium as an alternative source of nuclear
energy, but was not specific about the military possibilities.

Before the Academy could make its third report, in Novem-
ber 1941, Dr. Bush had raised the whole matter again with
President Roosevelt and Vice-President Wallace. He summarised
the British views. The President agreed that the American
programme ought to be recognised and broadened with the aid
of funds from a secret source, and also decided that it was a
matter on which there should be a complete interchange of
information with the British. On October n, 1941, he wrote
a letter to the British Prime Minister suggesting that any
extended efforts on this important matter might usefully be
co-ordinated or even jointly conducted.

"The proposal commended itself to us", Lord Waverley told
me, " because our resources were very heavily mortgaged and
we were in a very vulnerable position. We thought that the job
would go on far better on the other side of the Atlantic and that
there was where our people should be, apart from a few like
Akers and his personal assistant, Mr. Perrin."

The Americans then sent over to Britain Prof. Urey and Dr.
Pegram of Columbia University, two of their top men, to make
a closer study of the theoretical and experimental work that was
going on in Britain. A special meeting of the newly formed Tube
Alloys technical committee was called to review the whole field
of progress, and Urey and Pegram were of course told everything.

It may be a measure of American faith in their own project
that up till then less than 60,000 had been committed, and

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 67

that this was in fact the first visit that the Americans had made
to Britain specifically in connection with the uranium project.
It left them with a deep impression of optimism which con-
trasted with the more conservative report soon to be made by
the National Academy of Sciences.

Perrin, deputy director of Tube Alloys, who had taken over
his task only a few days before the visit of Urey and Pegram
in November 1941, tells me that he took advantage of their visit
to make a first tour of the various universities and industrial
establishments where work was being done. He sat in at all the
talks they had with people like Chadwick and Frisch at Liver-
pool, Peierls and Simon at Birmingham, Feather and Bretscher
and the French team at Cambridge, and saw progress by
Imperial Chemicals up at Widnes on the extraction of metallic
uranium. "There was no doubt of the effect it had upon them",
he told me. "The fact that men of this calibre had similar ideas
and had in many cases been thinking ahead of them certainly
gave them courage to talk firmly when they got back to
America."

There were in fact many scientists within the American ring
of consultants, including probably Fermi himself, who were no
more convinced that the bomb could be achieved at this stage
than they were in 1940, but the fact that the British and ap-
parently the Germans, both grimly at war, thought the problem
worth undertaking, together with the fact that a good deal of
progress admittedly had been made, swung the balance.

There had been also, as we are told in the Smyth report, a
"change of the whole national psychology ". Although the attack
on Pearl Harbour was still to come, the impending threat of
war was being felt more keenly than before. Expenditures of
money that would have seemed enormous in 1940 were being
taken for granted by 1941.

The American decision to go ahead with an "all-out" pro-
gramme was announced to the uranium section, known as
"S-i", of the Office of Scientific Research and Development,
on December 6, 1941. On that occasion they were also told of
the complete reorganisation of the group, which would be
under Dr. Conant as representative of Dr. Bush.

A British mission led by Akers and composed of Halban,

68 ATOM HARVEST

Peierls and Simon went over to the United States early in the
New Year. They were able to report that the Americans were
now fully engaged on a programme which planned to make the
fullest use of the country's enormous resources both in the
universities and in industry.

They had by this time come round to the British conclusion
that the bomb was definitely feasible. There was still a great
deal of uncertainty about the best way of producing the fissile
or explosive material, and four methods had been recom-
mended. One of these was the production of plutonium in a
graphite pile, and the others were various methods of separ-
ating uranium 235, including the electromagnetic and the
gaseous diffusion methods on which work had been done in
Britain.

In May 1942, Perrin went over to Canada with a two-fold
mission. The first was to sound Mr. Mackenzie King, the Prime
Minister, and Dr. C. J. Mackenzie, head of the National Re-
search Council, about transferring to Canada Dr. Halban and
the rest of the team working on the reactor side, so that they
would be nearer to Fermi and his team in Chicago; the second
was to persuade them of the desirability of acquiring control of
the Eldorado Mine in the far north, where uranium was mined
as a source of radium and for industrial purposes that, up till
then, had nothing to do with atomic energy.

Perrin passed through the United States on his way home
and talked the whole matter over with Bush, who was stil)
running the American project. Bush saw the different methods
of producing fissile material then under review rather like four
horses in a race. They were all good beasts and all well backed.
The British, he thought, had a good horse, too, but it was not
well enough supported. With proper resources behind it, Bush
thought the British horse had at least a chance of winning out
in the end. He wanted to see all run in the same race with an
equal degree of backing. He favoured the move to Canada.

In June the decision was taken in America to go ahead with
a major industrial project, and on August 13 a special group of
the Corps of Engineers known as the Manhattan District was
officially established for what was known for security reasons as
"D.S.M.", or the Development of Substitute Materials. One

TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP 69

month later Brigadier-General L. R. Groves, a dynamic young
engineer officer who, as a major, had built the gigantic Pentagon
building outside Washington, was put in complete charge of
the project.

About the same time the advance guard of the British team,
under the leadership of Halban, arrived in Canada and estab-
lished themselves in the laboratories of the National Research
Council in Montreal. The plan was a good one, for it enabled
work to continue in far greater freedom and with greater re-
sources than would have been possible in a Britain which, by
that time, was severely harassed by bombing. It should have
led to a much closer relationship with work in the United
States.

[6]

The Partnership Breaks Down

BY THE autumn of 1942, however, something had gone defi-
nitely wrong with Anglo-American relations as far as the atom
was concerned. It was all tied up with the change in status of
the project from that of an interesting scientific possibility to a
military probability. Having once become a military matter,
with a military man or commercial contractors in charge and
with industrial firms transforming fundamental scientific
theories into large-scale technological processes, United States
officialdom adopted at once a completely new attitude towards
the matter of co-operation.

British scientists who, with full approval of their Govern-
ment, had been ready to provide the Americans with all the
data they wanted, suddenly found doors closed upon them.
There is a popular but mistaken belief that this breakdown in
co-operation occurred after the war with the passing of the
McMahon Act in 1946. It would be truer to say that it started
the day the Americans were persuaded that, despite their own
misgivings, the production of atomic weapons before the end
of the war was possible.

It is difficult to create barriers, however, between scientists
who have been accustomed to working together for decades,
and there were still some interchanges between Fermi's group in
Chicago, who by December 1942 had got the world's first atomic
pile to work, and the now reinforced British group in Montreal.

Churchill had discussed the bomb with Roosevelt in their
Hyde Park meeting in June 1942. To Harry Hopkins, the
President's personal aide, he cabled afterwards: "My whole

70

THE PARTNERSHIP BREAKS DOWN 71

understanding was that everything was on the basis of fully
sharing the results as equal partners. I have no record, but I
shall be much surprised if the President's recollection does not
square with this."

The matter had been further discussed at Casablanca in
January 1943, when, according to Harry Hopkins's own diary,
the Prime Minister expressed concern because the previous
Anglo-American co-operation and full exchange of information
and experimentation seemed to have ended. Hopkins had
promised to look into the matter on his return to Washington.

Churchill, having heard no more from Hopkins, telegraphed
him again on February 16 : "I should be grateful for some news
about this as at present the American War Department is
asking us to keep them informed of our experiments while
refusing altogether any information about theirs."

Hopkins replied: "I have been making inquiries as a result
of your request to me in regard to Tube Alloys. It would be a
help to me to have Anderson (Lord Waverley) send me a full
mem by pouch of what he considers is the basis of the present
misunderstanding, since I gather the impression that our people
feel that no agreement has been breached. I should like particu-
larly to have copies of any recorded conversations or references
or memoranda which would reveal the nature of the mis-
understanding."

Churchill, who was sick at the time, sent by cable a long
record of Anglo-American dealings since the first exchanges of
1940. He expressed the conviction that this record proved that,
on the grounds of fair play, he could justify his request for the
restoration of the policy of joint work in developing the joint
resources of the two countries. " Urgent decisions about our
programme both here and in Canada", he said, "depend on
the extent to which full collaboration between us is restored
and I must ask you to let me have a firm decision on United
States policy in this matter very soon."

In a later cable to Hopkins Churchill was forced to the point
of saying that, if the full pooling of information on the progress
in nuclear fission were not resumed, then Britain would be
compelled to go ahead separately in this work and that that
"would be a sombre decision". Hopkins took the matter up

72 ATOM HARVEST

with the President, with Mr. Stimson, Secretary of War, and
with Dr. Bush and Dr. Conant.

A cable from Bush to Hopkins on March 31 revealed what
the Americans were up to. "The adopted policy", he wrote,
"is that information on this subject will be furnished to indi-
viduals, either in this country or in Great Britain, who need it
and can use it now in the furtherance of the war effort, but
that, in the interests of security, information interchanged will
be restricted to this definitive objective."

There was nothing new or unusual in this policy, the note
went on. "It is applied generally in this country and elsewhere.
To step beyond it would mean to furnish information on secret
military matters to individuals who wish it either because of
general interest or because of its application to non-war or
post-war matters. To do this would decrease security without
advancing the war effort."

Since the British were not, under the joint agreement, sup-
posed to be engaged in the production of uranium 235 or
plutonium, this amounted to a cold refusal to hand over to
Britain any "know-how" about the fabrication of fuel ele-
ments, the design of reactors, the processing of resultant plu-
tonium, or about other methods of producing fissile material
such as the gaseous diffusion of uranium. It was a sufficiently
good excuse to last until the end of the war when there could
always be an Act of Congress to make such exchanges illegal.

The Americans adhered to this policy to such an extent that
even in the matter of the separation of uranium 235 by the
process of gaseous diffusion, for which the British team worked
out both scientific and technological details, no scientist or
engineer was ever allowed to enter the plant at Oak Ridge and
our men were not even told whether the ideas that they had
developed had worked satisfactorily.

The excuse made for this action was that of security. Subse-
quent events indicated quite clearly that the question mainly
at stake was that of the post-war development of atomic power.
Mr. Churchill rightly objected in his correspondence with
Hopkins that the stand taken by the Americans gave them ex-
clusive possession of the fruits of joint research, including the
subsequent use of atomic energy for industrial purposes. The

THE PARTNERSHIP BREAKS DOWN 73

technique of accusing someone else of what you are in fact
guilty of doing yourself seems to have been singularly applicable
in the present case.

Tube Alloys had been divided into two groups, T.A.i and
T.A.2. The first dealt with fast neutron studies directly applic-
able to the process of fast fission that takes place when an
atomic bomb explodes. The second concentrated on slow neutron
work, that is to say, the atomic reactors in which plutonium
could be manufactured if this form of explosive were used.

From a security point of view it was considered that the work
of T.A.2, concerned chiefly with getting a reactor to operate,
would serve as a useful cover for T.A.i if the story leaked out,
and would deflect interest away from the bomb itself.

Mr. Stimson came over to Britain himself in the early summer
of 1943, soon after some further cabled exchanges. He repre-
sented to Mr. Churchill that the impression was gaining ground
in America that the British were interested in the atomic
bomb project primarily for the economic advantages that
might accrue. The Americans, he said, could not see the fun
of spending billions of dollars to find out things for someone
else to use in a competitive post-war world.

The discussion between Mr. Churchill and Mr. Stimson on
this matter was a very personal, informal affair. Stimson had
come over to discuss a number of different matters. There were
very few members even of the War Cabinet who knew anything
of the atomic bomb project, so carefully had the secret been
guarded.

When the atom bomb question cropped up, Lord Waverley
was naturally called in. No others were present. Waverley
explained how completely wrong was the point of view that
Stimson had put forward. Stimson pretended to be uncon-
vinced. It was then, it appears, that Mr. Churchill, in his
characteristically magnanimous way and as a supreme gesture
of good faith, put forward the proposition, later to be formalised
in the Quebec agreement, that full collaboration should be
reopened and the matter of post-war applications be left entirely
to the discretion of the American President.

Instead of getting better, matters got worse after the Stimson
talk.

74 ATOM HARVEST

"We were greatly worried", Lord Waverley told me, "be-
cause the basis for exchange that we had previously had was
clearly in the process of being withdrawn." It got to the point
where the President telegraphed Churchill suggesting that he
should send over one of his top men to sort the matter out.
Waverley agreed to go and immediately got in touch there with
Dr. Bush and Dr. Conant and General Groves, the head of the
Manhattan District Project. Waverley took with him as personal
adviser Mr. Gorell Barnes from the Cabinet office. Together
they framed the heads of the agreement that was signed in
Quebec a month later.

The agreement, typed out on Citadel notepaper, showed
how far Great Britain was prepared to trust her American allies.
In the cold light of history it may seem a little naive. Its phraseo-
logy is revealing. "Whereas it is vital to our common safety
in the present war to bring the Tube Alloys project to fruition
at the earliest moment," it starts, "and whereas this may be
more speedily achieved if all available British and American
brains and resources are pooled; and whereas owing to war
conditions it would be an improvident use of war resources to
duplicate plants on a large scale on both sides of the Atlantic
and therefore a far greater expense has fallen upon the United
States; . . ."

It was agreed never to use the weapon against each other nor
against third parties without each other's consent nor to com-
municate any of the information gained to third parties without
mutual consent. The fourth clause, and from some points of
view the most important, stated that in view of the great burden
falling on the United States the British Government recognised
that any post-war advantages of an industrial or commercial
character should be dealt with as between the United States
and Great Britain on terms to be specified by the President of
the United States. The Prime Minister expressly disclaimed
"any interest in these industrial and commercial aspects beyond
what may be considered by the President of the United States
to be fair and just and in harmony with the economic welfare
of the world".

In exchange, the Quebec agreement arranged for the setting
up of a Combined Policy Committee on a fifty-fifty basis to

THE PARTNERSHIP BREAKS DOWN 75

keep all sections of the project under constant review and to
settle any questions that might arise on the interpretation of
the agreement.

It specified that there should be " complete interchange of
information and ideas on all sections of the project between
members of the Policy Committee and their immediate tech-
nical advisers".

In the vital field of scientific research and development there
was to be a "full and effective interchange of information and
ideas between those in the two countries engaged in the same sections of
the field". The italics are my own and are there to emphasise a
clause that was to give the Americans their excuse to exclude
the British from information on all vital production techniques.
If the Americans were producing the nuclear explosive, they
were to argue later in justification of their action, then there
was no need for the British to produce any, and if the British
were not engaged in production, then there was nothing in the
Quebec agreement to authorise the passing over of information.

Lest there should be any doubt in this direction, the last
clause of the agreement specified that in the field of design,
construction and operation of large-scale plants, interchange
should be regulated "by such ad hoc arrangements as may, in
each section of the field, appear necessary or desirable if the
project is to be brought to fruition at the earliest moment".
Any such agreements had to be approved by the Combined
Policy Committee which, on the American side, consisted of
Dr. Bush, Dr. Conant and the Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson,
who had already shown himself to be unhelpful in this respect.

The agreement was signed by President Roosevelt and
Mr. Churchill in the Citadel of Quebec on August 19, 1943. It
was essentially a war-time agreement. Between two allies both
acting openly and in good faith it provided the basis of an
effective partnership.

There were many good arguments in favour of the doctrine
of "compartmentalisation" which the agreement recognised.
It is a sound security tenet, recognised on both sides of the
Atlantic, that highly sensitive information should not be dis-
closed to any person who does not need it in the performance of
his duty.

76 ATOM HARVEST

The effectiveness of the doctrine stands or falls on the way in
which it is implemented. With her limited manpower Britain
herself could not afford to create a vast number of completely
watertight compartments and it would not have been economic
to do so. In America there were many examples where a tre-
mendous amount of effort was wasted by compartmentalisa-
tion, because of barriers which prevented information acquired
but not needed by one department from flowing freely to other
departments where it would have been invaluable.

Its effectiveness, on the other hand, is demonstrated by the
fact that many men in Britain carried out important research
work for people like Professor Chadwick without ever knowing
the purpose for which that work was intended. In America, at
Los Alamos, many workers who fondly believed at the time
they were working on the uranium or plutonium bombs only
discovered years later that their calculations had been quite
clearly required and used instead on development of the
hydrogen bomb.

It could, however, be exploited to extract the maximum in-
formation from the British in the scientific fields where they
were working, without conveying any obligation whatsoever
on the Americans to pass to the British the technological
information they would need to develop an atomic energy
project of their own, either for defence or to set her peace-time
economy on a permanently stable basis in the post-war world.

It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if
Mr. Roosevelt had lived. The agreement was a secret one and
was only made public by Sir Winston Churchill in April 1954.
Americans, of course, abhor secret treaties. They cut right
across the powers of the legislature to question and amend or
approve. It is most unlikely that formal agreement, open to such
debate, could ever have been reached in terms as favourable to
Britain. By mid- 1943 the Americans had really sucked most of
our ideas. The basic anatomy of the project, even of the bomb
itself, was known. The Americans had an enormous construc-
tion programme under way to put these findings into effect.

While the Quebec agreement has been criticised by some in
Britain because it depended entirely on good faith and on what
a President of the United States considered "fair and just", it

THE PARTNERSHIP BREAKS DOWN 77

must not be forgotten that its terms have been much criticised
and would have been equally unpopular in some quarters in
the United States.

The story goes that General Groves was only informed of the
final text of the agreement shortly before it was due for signa-
ture, and sent one of his staff officers to Quebec by air in an
effort to have it amended. He was too late. As General Groves
was the man who had to put the agreement into effect in war-
time, this was not a good start and it is perhaps to his credit
that he helped as much as he did.

By the time the war came to an end, of course, Mr. Roosevelt
was dead. Mr. Truman, a man relatively unknown to the
American public, had taken his place, and the Democrats had
another election campaign ahead of them. The decision was
taken not to publish the text of the Quebec agreement. The
Smyth report, "a general account of the development of
methods of using atomic energy for military purposes under the
auspices of the United States Government", published in
August 1945, gave no hint of its terms.

In the year that followed, two Bills on the control of atomic
energy were debated by a Congress completely unaware of the
terms of the agreement with the British and Canadians by
which they were at least morally bound. The McMahon Act,
forbidding the passing of information on power production or
weapons or the transfer of fissile material to any other country,
was drafted, debated, passed by Congress and signed by Mr.
Truman.

Senator McMahon, who had drafted the Atomic Energy Act,
to his great embarrassment, was only shown the text of the
Quebec agreement after he had accepted chairmanship of the
Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. The same
applied to Mr. David E. Lilienthal, who was appointed chair-
man of the newly established Atomic Energy Commission.

Why did Britain keep quiet herself and watch in silence an
Act passed by Congress which made no distinction between
countries like Britain and Canada and our late enemies or
those with whom at the time we were engaged in a cold war?
It might well have been argued that the terms of the Act about
to be passed by Congress so shamefully cut across the spirit of

78 ATOM HARVEST

the agreement that they rendered its terms null, including the
British obligation to secrecy.

Against this were the equally strong arguments that there
was still a peace to be won and that Britain was in no position
to win it on her own. The world depended more than ever
before at that time on a show of Anglo-American co-operation.
There was also the fact, undoubtedly to be taken into considera-
tion, that if any row over secret treaties had blown up it might
have helped isolationists into power in America with inevitable
repercussions in Europe and the world at large.

One of the provisions of the Anglo-Canadian- American agree-
ment was for the sharing of uranium supplies from the Belgian
Congo. The story of how these supplies came to be available at
all has never been publicised.

Belgium, itself, of course, was occupied by the German
armies. Its exiled Government was operating from London.
The Congo uranium is mined by what is known as the Societ<
Mini&res de Haute Katanga. The general manager of this
company, M. Sengier, who was in the United States on a visit,
was approached by the Americans, who wanted to acquire the
total output. As a senior official said at the time, "they tried to
pull a fast one*'. M. Sengier would have none of it. When he
returned to Britain, Lord Waverley approached him with little
more success.

Waverley then appealed to the exiled Belgian Government
and invited the late Mr. Winant, the American Ambassador,
to join the discussions. Winant said he would leave the matter
entirely to Waverley. The outcome of the talks was extremely
satisfactory, and Sir (then Mr.) Anthony Eden signed with M.
Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister, and M, de Cleeschauwer,
the Minister for the Colonies, the agreement under which the
Manhattan project got the bulk of its supplies.

One happy result of the Quebec agreement was the closer
and fruitful co-operation that sprang up between the British
and the Canadians. During the initial period Waverley had got
the Americans to agree that the British side of the Combined
Policy Committee should include a Canadian and that Canada
should be considered as sharing the British side of the agreement.

Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister, viewed the

THE PARTNERSHIP BREAKS DOWN 79

idea, I understand, with mixed feelings when it was first sug-
gested to him. Waverley had put to him that atomic energy
was a big and coming thing and had offered to make the
Canadians equal partners. The suggestion was that Britain
should supply a large proportion of the scientists and pay their
salaries, while the Canadians would be expected to pay for the
expenses locally incurred by the work.

Mr. Mackenzie King was inclined to be suspicious at first,
and so was his ministerial colleague, Mr. C. D. Howe, and both
were reluctant to commit themselves to an enterprise that no-
one could see an end to. In the end they agreed, however, and the
Anglo-Canadian co-operation in this sphere matured and the
joint establishments in Montreal and at Chalk River, 120 miles
from Ottawa, grew into installations of very great importance
that were to play a vital part in the birth of Britain's own
post-war project.

As a further result of the Quebec agreement, teams of scien-
tists started moving over from Britain to the United States so
that they could make a more direct contribution to the main
bomb project. Professor Chad wick was established in Washing-
ton as scientific adviser to the British members of the Combined
Policy Committee. His staff was joined by Niels Bohr, who,
under the code name of "Mr. Baker", had been smuggled first
to Sweden and then to Britain.

To Berkeley, California, one of the principal centres of
nuclear research in America, went Oliphant, Massey, Allibone
and Wilkinson. Emeleus and Baxter went to work on a plant
for the separation of uranium by an electromagnetic method,
while Frisch and Bretscher went to the weapons research estab-
lishment at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where they were joined
later by Peierls, Penney and, from time to time, by Professor
Sir Geoffrey Taylor, the ballistics expert, and by Chadwick,
leader of the group, who spent a great deal of his time in
Washington.

The effect of these transfers and others that were made to the
project in Montreal was to close down almost entirely all work
in Britain on nuclear physics. In the British view the decision
was the only proper course to take in view of the decision to
give the highest priority to the production of the bomb.

[7]
Nuclear Monopoly

BY THE time the war ended the Americans had built no less than
nine atomic reactors. They were, as far as we know, the only
atomic reactors in the world. One of them, the very first, had
already been dismantled after Fermi had used it to prove that
the idea of a " self-sustaining chain reaction" was feasible,
using a graphite system.

To be strictly accurate, even this was not the first "pile" of
all, for the name itself derived from the fact that Fermi and his
co-workers, in their earlier studies, had used piles of graphite
blocks heaped one upon another to measure the extent to
which the neutrons, the life-blood of the chain reaction, were
wastefully absorbed by impurities in the various materials.
They had already assembled nine such heaps of uranium and
graphite over a period of more than a year, before their
measurements told them in July 1942 that it would be worth
while trying to build an actual graphite reactor.

When they did so, in a disused squash court beneath the
stands of the playing fields of the University of Chicago, it was
almost inevitable that this reactor, which worked for the first
time on December 2, 1942, should be named by officialdom
" C.P.i" (Chicago Pile One).

C.P.2, like C.P.i, was a simple affair. Because there was still
hardly any uranium in the metallic form, they both used as
fuel the commoner, powdered, compound of the element known
as uranium oxide. The heat generated inside C.P.2, ten times
as much as in its predecessor, was still only equivalent to that
of a single large domestic electric fire. Air was blown through

80

NUCLEAR MONOPOLY 8l

the structure to cool it. Others like it, all of low power, were
built at Oak Ridge and at Hanford, Washington, where the
first three giant production piles were later located.

Two other research reactors were completed before the war
ended; one, C.P.3, was at Chicago, of course. The other was at
Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were designed and
built. It would be most inappropriate to refer to either of these
reactors as "piles", however, because in both of them the re-
action was conducted not in a heap of graphite blocks but in a
tank of heavy water, so called because it is water in which the
hydrogen atoms are twice as heavy as normal hydrogen.

It is worth digressing for a moment to see why a "moderator"
or operating medium of heavy water or graphite should be
needed at all. It will be remembered that natural-occurring
uranium had been ruled out early in the war as a possible atomic
explosive, because neutrons produced by the fission of the
lighter uranium 235 component were gobbled up by uranium
238 before they had a chance to reach another atom of uranium
235. The neutrons, in fact, were absorbed by the uranium 238,
which was in turn transmuted by several stages into a new
element, plutonium.

Investigations soon proved that the extent to which the
neutrons were gobbled up depended on the speed at which
the neutrons were travelling. Neutrons of certain speeds were
absorbed easily, but when slowed down sufficiently to what are
known as "thermal" energies, the absorption was less important.

It became apparent that what was required was some form
of system in which neutrons, immediately they had been re-
leased by one fission, would leave the mixed uranium fuel
elements until such time as they had been slowed down to
speeds where they would no longer be absorbed by the uranium
238 and would have a chance of bringing about further fission
of uranium 235 atoms that formed less than i per cent of the
natural metal.

A lattice design suggested itself in which pieces or rods of the
metal or of purified oxide were interspersed in some medium
that would slow down neutrons by a succession of ricochet
collisions. The substances best able to do this would be those
containing atoms of the same weight as the neutrons.

82 ATOM HARVEST

The reason for this will be apparent if we think of a neutron
for a moment as a perfectly elastic ball. If such a ball, travelling
at a great speed, is allowed to collide with a stationary ball of
the same size and weight, the energy of the fast-moving one
will be shared equally with the other and half the energy of the
first one will be lost. The same process would be expected in
each successive collision. If instead the fast-moving ball had hit
another of many times its own weight it would have bounced
off again as if from a hard floor at much the same speed as
before and without having any effect on the object it hit and
without losing energy in the process.

Neutrons have mass equal to one atomic weight unit and the
only other thing that weighs the same amount is the nucleus of
the ordinary hydrogen atom. That would have meant using as
a " moderator " to slow down the neutrons a substance con-
taining plenty of hydrogen, such as water or paraffin. The diffi-
culty there, scientists soon found, was that ordinary hydrogen
itself tends to absorb neutrons of low energies. There is, how-
ever, another form, known as heavy hydrogen, or deuterium.
This occurs in nature in heavy water, that forms in turn ap-
proximately one part in 4,500 of all water in the world, whether
it be rain, in the sea, in lakes or rivers, or in the human body.
Tests had shown that heavy hydrogen, which already contains
one neutron, did not absorb more.

The proportion of heavy water in ordinary water can be in-
creased by a number of different processes which take advantage
either of the fact that this substance boils at a temperature
slightly higher than ordinary water, or of other slight differences
in physical properties. All these processes are expensive and
there was only one such plant in the world at the beginning
of the war, the Norsk Hydro in Norway, where the process was
carried out on a commercial basis.

A number of other light elements were considered at the
time. Helium, the next element in the list and weighing four
units, was ruled out because it was a gas and formed no solid
or liquid compounds. Lithium, the third element, and boron,
the fifth, excluded themselves automatically because they ab-
sorbed neutrons. This left beryllium, the fourth element, weigh-
ing approximately nine units, and carbon, the sixth, weighing

NUCLEAR MONOPOLY 83

twelve. Beryllium was rarely used for anything at that period
except in very small quantities in fluorescent lamp tubes and
there was little hope of obtaining quickly a sufficient quantity.
Carbon instead, in the form of graphite, had many properties
to recommend it and it was used in most of the early American
piles and also in the British ones that followed.

Heavy water, however, had many advantages, Not only did
it "moderate" or slow up the neutrons far more effectively
than the bulkier carbon atoms of graphite, thus permitting much
smaller reactors with a corresponding smaller investment of
fissile material. It was also liquid and needed no careful
machining to shape with special expensive tools. It was easier
to purify and could easily be cooled on exit from the reactor by
passing it through a "heat exchanger", or series of cooling
tubes. The first reactor of this sort using heavy water as a
medium was C.P.3 (Chicago Pile 3), which operated at very
low energy.

The use of liquid moderators offered a further and very im-
portant possibility which the Americans tried out for the first
time in an experimental reactor known as the Los Alamos
"Water Boiler". In this reactor, which provided vital data for
the bomb project, the atomic fuel used was a soluble compound
of uranium containing more of the 235 form than usual. This
for reasons that will be apparent later, permitted ordinary
water to be used in place of the more expensive heavy water.
The working solution was known as "soup", and it was con-
tained in a stainless steel cauldron in which it was free to bubble
or boil.

Even more important technical developments were in the
offing, for in 1946 a reactor named "Clementine" was brought
into action which was bound to have direct bearing on many
of the peace-time problems of producing atomic power.
Clementine used pure atomic fuel of "weapon grade". This,
for various technical reasons, meant that it could operate on
fast neutrons and therefore needed no moderator to slow them
down. Lastly, it used for the first time a liquid metal coolant,
mercury.

It will be seen that America thus finished the war with a
formidable start over the rest of the world in the race for atomic

84 ATOM HARVEST

power. Their installations continued to yield valuable informa-
tion to scientists and engineers during the succeeding years
while other nations were groping in the dark.

This American monopoly of atomic energy was short-lived,
however, for no act of national legislation could hope to bar the
general march of scientific progress. All it could do was to slow
it down and cause bitterness between friends.

With the possible exception of Russia, about which there is
no precise information, the first country outside the United
States to build a reactor of her own was Canada. It is a matter
of great pride for Britain that her own scientists took a promi-
nent part in the design of both this first reactor, known as
ZEEP (Zero Energy Experimental Pile), completed in autumn
1945, and in its much larger and more important successor
NRX (National Research Experimental, finished in 1947. The
scientists and engineers did their job so well in fact that for five
years or more NRX was the richest source of neutrons and the
most powerful research pile in existence anywhere in the world.

Canada's association with nuclear physics, of course, dated
back to the days when Rutherford, from New Zealand, and
Soddy, discoverer of isotopes, had spent a period at the Uni-
versity of Montreal. Interest had been renewed in the early
days of the war when men like Laurence and Sargent in 1942
started performing experiments with graphite and uranium.
NRX was to a certain extent an Anglo-American-Canadian
project. This sprang from the fact that the fuel for it had to be
made available by the Americans.

Canada in fact provided the "hot laboratories" specially
suited for work with dangerously radioactive materials during
the post-war period, while a similar laboratory was being con-
structed at Harwell, and ZEEP, the first Canadian reactor, was
invaluable in making measurements of the properties of various
materials that were being considered for the first British reactors.

Other countries were interested in atomic energy, too. The
war-time teams in Canada had, of course, included a number
of French scientists, including a team of physicists under von
Halban and the chemists under Gueron. Dr. Lew Kowarski, one
of the physicists, played an important part in the design of
ZEEP. After the war he returned to France to head the reactor

NUCLEAR MONOPOLY 85

division of the newly formed C.E.A., the atomic energy com-
mission of France. To direct the commission the French Govern-
ment chose Joliot.

Joliot, as most of those who know him will avow, is a born
leader. He is also a good business man, as may be judged from
the speed with which his pre-war team took out patents for
atomic reactors, along much the same lines of some working
today, a year or so before Fermi got the first Chicago pile to
work. But Joliot was passionately devoted to Communism and
his commission soon became full of Communists. When, in 1950,
two years after he had been sacked by his Government because
of his political views, I visited the atomic energy establishment
at Fort Chatillon on the outskirts of Paris, there was still not
a room in the old Napoleonic fort that had not its photograph
of "our director".

In those early days France had already made great strides.
At Le Bouchet, thirty-five kilometres south of Paris, in a disused
government explosives factory, she had set up a well-run estab-
lishment for processing ore from her uranium mines in the
Massif Central and converting it into ingots of pure metal. At
Saclay, nearer to the capital, in the open fields, the foundations
were being laid of a model research establishment which, but
for its size, would have vied with any in the world. The founda-
tions were already laid for P-2, a much more powerful pile
capable of producing significant quantities of the atomic fuel
and explosive, plutonium.

True, there were no signs of the giant atom-smashing
machines of the British and American universities and atomic
establishments, but there was the enthusiasm and a great
scientific tradition pervading the work, which promised well
for the future if the material means were not lacking. With
two piles in action, one of zero energy and another of 4,000
kilowatts, she has the useful basis for further steps forward.
Two plutonium-producing reactors, one due to be finished
in 1957 and the second in 1958, will, after a "cooking period"
of several years, provide her with the sizeable quantities of
fissile material that she will need for advanced industrial
reactors and for weapons should she decide to direct valuable
supplies in that direction.

86 ATOM HARVEST

Post-war development in the atomic energy field are not
limited to the four major participants in the war-time project,
and Russia. Almost every civilised country in the world formed
its own atomic energy organisation after the war and many of
them have made considerable progress. If Britain, Canada and
France, who after participating in one way or another in the
giant war-time atomic bomb project still felt in the dark when
the war ended, it may well be imagined that things were far
more difficult in countries like Norway and Sweden, Holland
and Belgium and Denmark.

Two of these countries, Norway and Holland, decided to
tackle the problem together by setting up a joint project at
Kjeller in Norway, in 1950, under an astrophysicist, Dr.
Gunner Randers. They completed their first reactor, known as
JEEP, in the following year, using heavy water made by the
famous Norsk hydro plant at Rjukan, and uranium that
Holland had purchased from Belgium for the purpose in 1939.
Setting a fine example to other countries, they declared that
none of their work would be secret and at once invited scientists
from Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Norway, Holland
and the United States to join them. The task of all these
countries and also that of Germany has been considerably im-
proved by recent British and American decisions to make avail-
able both information and supplies of fissile material.

It is now apparent that not all the smaller countries are content
to make their entry into the atomic energy field for peaceful
purposes alone. The Commander-in-Chief of the Swedish
Army, General Nils Svedlund, on November i, 1954, announced
that during the next ten years the Swedish forces would be
modernised and equipped with tactical atomic weapons and
robot weapons. About 36 million, he said, had been reserved
for the new weapons, increasing Sweden's arms expenditure to
189,300,000. Costs, he claimed, would be cut down by re-
ducing the army's share from 41 per cent to 34 per cent, and
the navy's from 20 per cent to 1 7 per cent. The air force's share
would go up from 32 per cent to 37 per cent. Heavier arma-
ment and greater fire-power, especially in the anti-aircraft
equipment, were promised.

The announcement is interesting for a number of reasons.

NUCLEAR MONOPOLY 87

First of all, the boast that armament would include tactical
atomic weapons clearly shows that such weapons are no longer
the prerogative of a few countries with a great deal of research
and development facilities at their disposal. The Americans had
given the impression that the tactical or lightweight, easily de-
livered weapons that they had developed depended on a succes-
sion of atomic tests of which there have been to date more than
fifty. We have no precise information of the nature or the
efficiency of the American weapons, but it is of significance that
a small country like Sweden should boast its ability to produce
such weapons before ever it has made a test at all.

It is possible to go a little further than the announcement by
General Svedlund and to say that it would be no surprise at all
if Sweden and any other small country like Sweden were to
announce their intention of making hydrogen or super-bombs
as well. Experts with whom I have spoken tell me they see no
reason why improved thermonuclear weapons, easier and
cheaper to make, such as are now being produced in the
United States, Britain and Russia, should not in time be made
and used equally successfully by the Swedes or any other
country with comparable scientific and industrial resources.

[8]
Harwell is Born

IT WAS clear long before the war ended that Britain would need
to have an atomic energy project of her own at the close of
hostilities. She could not continue to depend entirely on the
laboratories in Montreal and Chalk River. The idea of setting
up a British establishment was first mentioned, according to
Sir John Cockcroft, at a discussion in Washington in November
1944. Akers, director of the whole Tube Alloys project, had
come out from London. Chadwick, head of the mission in
Washington, was there. Cockcroft himself, who had replaced
Halban as chief of the Anglo-Canadian project, had come over
from Montreal, Peierls from Los Alamos, Oliphant from
Berkeley.

The first requirement, they all agreed, was a research estab-
lishment. Their plans were not extravagant and afforded little
justification for American suggestions that the British were only
interested in post-war commercial developments.

"We thought we would set up an establishment on a modest
scale with a pile and a Van de Graaff machine (an atom-
splitting device) and a few other tools of nuclear physics", Sir
John wrote later. "The recommendation was passed to Sir John
Anderson and his consultative council and during the summer
and autumn of 1945 the plan was further elaborated in England.

"We considered the desirable conditions for the future
establishment", says Sir John. "It had to be not too far from
London; there should be easy access to a major university;
there should be some degree of isolation, and lastly, the country-
side should be pleasant to live in."

88

HARWELL IS BORN

INDUSTRIAL CROUP H.Q.
ENCINfERING DESIGN

OPERATIONS H. O.
ADMINISTRATION 4 ACCOUNT*
R O HEADQUARTERS

R.C.C.

AMERSHAM

A.E.R.E.

Atomic research or production establishments are bringing new traditions
to widely scattered towns and villages in Britain. Some of them, like those
of Windscale and Dounreay, are in sparsely populated areas with few
industries. Others, like Risley, have had to be placed near existing
industrial centres.

90 ATOM HARVEST

It was obviously desirable that they should start with a pre-
pared site, with roads, services and some permanent buildings,
and Lord Cherwell suggested they should look for a suitable
R.A.F. airfield. So, in a hurried visit to England in the autumn
of 1945, Professor Oliphant and Sir John Cockcroft looked at
airfields. Most of those suggested had very temporary buildings
and offered little advantages over open sites. " We were left with
a short list of Duxford, near Cambridge; South Cerney, near
Cirencester; Benson and Harwell. Duxford, in spite of the great
advantages of proximity to Cambridge, was voted to be too
inaccessible to most universities and there was not enough
water available. South Cerney was an attractive airfield but
somewhat too isolated."

In the end they asked for Harwell, Sir John tells us, and "on
a windy day of February 1946, on a flying visit from Canada,
I was able with Skinner and Fisher to look closely at our
heritage ".

Those who, like Cockcroft, Skinner and Fisher, remember
their first reconnaissances of that lonely aerodrome in Berk-
shire, must find it hard to reconcile their memories with the
establishment that now occupies the same ground and contains
equipment of variety and complexity that few if any would then
have dared to contemplate.

Within the 300 or so acres now occupied by the establish-
ment, there are known to be six atomic piles. There may well
be others that have never been talked about. But atomic
reactors only tell one small fraction of the whole story.

There are nineteen divisions altogether at Harwell, and be-
tween them they range over the whole field of nuclear research
and technology. They include departments of chemistry and
of engineering, of electronics, chemical engineering, health
physics, isotopes, medicine, metallurgy, and various divisions of
theoretical and applied physics. Many of these divisions are the
size of large university research schools and each is under a
head who enjoys status comparable with that of a university
professor. Side by side with the atomic energy establishment,
but outside the security fence, there is the Radiobiological
Research Establishment of the Medical Research Council,
which investigates the effects of nuclear radiation and a thriving

HARWELL IS BORN QI

atomic energy instructional establishment that is attended by
students from almost every country in the world.

The first glimpse the visitor catches of Harwell, if he knows
what to look for, is the tip of the soo-foot chimney of BEPO,
the biggest of the establishment's reactors. It can be seen over
hills and houses when you are still five miles or so from the
establishment. On drawing nearer, the buildings suddenly
come into view as an untidy and motley cluster of prefabri-
cated houses and huts, one-time aeroplane hangars, and the
typical brick buildings of a modern aerodrome. Here and
there, in sharp contrast, can be seen pleasant new buildings of
modern and more enlightened design which will blend well
later with the well-kept lawns and shrubberies and 10,000 or
more trees that have been planted in the grounds since the
scientists arrived.

Harwell was officially taken over from the R.A.F. on New
Year's Day, 1946 by an administrative Civil Servant, Mr. A. B.
Jones. The only officially allocated member of his staff, he tells
me, was an extremely competent secretary named Betty Hillen.
From the R.A.F. , however, he inherited four drivers, a carpen-
ter and a handful of labourers. Days later he found he had one
more man on the roll, a watchman on a nearby dump who had
been completely forgotten about at hand-over time. There was
no transport and no cash.

Every now and again a lone aeroplane, ignoring the large
white crosses painted on the landing strips, would alight on the
airfield and its pilot would express great astonishment at finding
the place "gone to the boffins". When building began in
earnest and the public came to hear of the new developments at
Harwell, so many pilots landed with trumped-up and at times
quite fantastic excuses about engine trouble and the like that the
security men began reporting them to the Ministry of Civil
Aviation and asking for disciplinary action.

But at this stage of the proceedings the really interesting
work was going on 4,000 miles away at Chalk River and in
Montreal, for it was on the teams in Canada that Britain had to
depend for the early planning of her own atomic energy project.

At Chalk River the joint team was already engaged in de-
signing the large heavy water pile, NRX, and in working out

92 ATOM HARVEST

the complicated chemical techniques that would be necessary.
After the Washington meeting, and immediately the decision
was taken to set up a post-war research establishment in
Britain, a new group was set up to design a large graphite
reactor for the British project.

Those early days in Canada, when telegrams were whizzing
backwards and forwards across the Atlantic in an effort to
make arrangements for the new establishment, were not without
their lighter moments. The fine establishment that now stands
at Chalk River, 100 miles from Ottawa, was still in those days
a Red Indian settlement. Accommodation at Deep River
nearby was primitive, and the only people who could be per-
suaded to work there were the British and French, a fact which
was quickly ascribed by them to the lack of central heating and
other facilities to which the Canadians were accustomed.

The prefabricated bungalow where the small team lived,
which served as a night stop for visitors, was christened the
Ipswich Arms in recognition of the fact that its "curator",
Fred Penning, one of the reactor physicists, came from East
Anglia. At that time the entire staff at Chalk River were able
to travel to and from work in a single station wagon. The team
soon grew, however, and the number of bungalows increased
as men from Canada, New Zealand and more from Britain
arrived on the new site.

An anonymous writer in Harlequin, the Harwell magazine,
tells how some of the scientists bought what for Canada was an
ancient Pontiac of 1934 vintage. It was "a trifle passee but
every inch a lady" and was christened Priscilla. The tyres had
seen better days, it was true, and the transmission suggested
that at least a part of its life had been spent as a taxi. The door
by the driver's seat had a habit of opening at unexpected times,
but, the writer tells us, as the opening of a door is commonly
used over there as a signal for turning, it merely looked as
though the driver was proceeding in an agony of indecision.

The decision that the first pile to be designed by the Anglo-
Canadian-French team would be a heavy water reactor, NRX,
was only taken after a great deal of discussion. Auger, the
French scientist, who is now chief of the science department
of UNESCO and a member of the French Atomic Energy

HARWELL IS BORN 93

Commission, had wanted to build a graphite one. Other mem-
bers of the team favoured one of heavy water but they could
not get enough. By this time, however, the heavy water plant
established by the Americans had come into production. The
Americans were consulted. They had no large heavy water pile
of their own at the time and were glad to have the joint team
explore the project. An agreement was signed between the
United States, Canada and the United Kingdom whereby the
Americans agreed to supply heavy water, the Canadians pro-
vided money and Britain provided scientists.

The design team worked fast, and construction of the reactor
started on the Chalk River site in 1944. In the meantime, in
order to have a reactor ready as soon as possible, work had
started on a much smaller pile, ZEEP, and by the time this was
finished in the summer of 1945 the main NRX pile was largely
built, but because of a whole host of minor engineering troubles
it was to take a further thirty months to make it work. NRX
functioned remarkably well until December 12, 1952, and en-
joyed undisputed pride of place as the most powerful research
reactor in the Western world. An accident occurred on that
day and the reactor had to be dismantled. The task of making
good the damage and reassembling the reactor took two years.
It provided most valuable experience on the repair of radio-
active plant, and when the task was completed the reactor was
considerably more powerful than before.

In part at least responsible for difficulties with NRX was the
fact that Britain was by then forming her own atomic project
and there was a continual change-over of personnel in the
British component of the Commonwealth team. So far as the
British project was concerned the choice of an initial reactor
was limited to the question of whether it could be a small one
or a big one. There was no likelihood of getting more heavy
water from the Americans and there was no other source large
enough. It was therefore decided to go ahead with the design
of BEPO (British Experimental Pile), an air-cooled graphite-
moderated pile large enough to supply the various radioactive
materials needed for scientific research for industry and
medicine.

The men entrusted with the task included Newell, now back

94 ATOM HARVEST

at I.G.I., Volkoff, now a professor in British Columbia, Kow-
arski, the French scientist, Pryce, now a professor at Bristol,
and Guggenheim, together with Tongue, Dunworth, Rennie,
Bunemann, Whitehouse and Fenning.

From the point of view of designing processing plant to deal
with the used fuel, the most troublesome complications arose
from the presence of the highly active fission products than
from any chemical difficulty. There were several processes that
could be used for separating the uranium and plutonium. The
question that had to be decided was, which of them would be
the most efficient under the conditions of remote control that
would have to operate for the protection of personnel. It was
known that the Americans had favoured a method known as
" precipitation", but they had jealously guarded the details. A
chemist named Dr. R. Spence was given the task of finding the
answer.

Spence was a young man, he must have been forty at the time,
a good chemist and full of enthusiasm. Because there were no
"hot laboratories" in those days of late 1945 in Britain, he
worked in Canada, first in the laboratories at Montreal, where
much work had been done throughout the war by a mixed
team of British, Canadian and French scientists and later at
the Chalk River laboratories.

My first meeting with Dr. Spence provided me with a big
surprise. I had gone down to Harwell to see him and had been
warned to expect a shy man.

His office was in a new brick building that faced out across
a barbed-wire fence and overlooked the old airfield. A great
aluminium chart picked out with coloured lights met me in the
entrance hall. It was the elaborate but rarely used "hot"
laboratory alarm system. I found another just like it in Spence's
own anteroom. On it was shown a floor plan of the entire
laboratory, each room picked out with two electric lamps, one
red for fire, another blue to indicate an accident involving
radioactive materials.

Spence came out to meet me as I hesitated on the threshold,
flung out a large hand and gave me a welcoming handshake.
"Well," he queried, "what can I tell you?" It was a good
start, and I told him I was curious to know how any team could

HARWELL IS BORN 95

design a chemical plant worth 20 million or so on the basis of
experiments done with an almost invisible quantity of plu-
tonium. "It was not easy", he told me. "But that was all we
had so we made the best of it."

It would be hard to exaggerate the difficulties of the separa-
tion process that would be needed to extract plutonium from
the slugs of uranium once they had been irradiated jn the
atomic piles. Pure plutonium is very much like pure uranium,
and both look very much the same as nickel or silver. While
they are different chemically from each other, they are too
much alike for the process of separation to be anything but a
very complex one. It was, as the Smyth Report on the develop-
ment of atomic energy for military purposes stated, "a problem
of separating at a daily rate of, say, several grammes of plu-
tonium from several thousand grammes of uranium which was
contaminated with large amounts of dangerously radioactive
fission products comprising twenty different elements". The
problem was especially difficult because the degree of purity
required was very high indeed, and the cost and importance of
the material meant that wastage must be cut down to an absolute
minimum.

The Americans, instead of telling the Canadians the methods
they used, offered instead to pass over a limited number of
uranium fuel slugs that had been irradiated in the pile at
Clinton. The idea, from their point of view, was a good one.
There were still no final ideas on the best method for separation
and there was always the chance that the teams in Canada
might produce something better than they had. The Anglo-
Canadian team, for their part, were grateful. The supplies from
Clinton, though meagre, were just enough to allow the Montreal
laboratory to work out the necessary chemistry. The amount of
plutonium in a fuel element depends always on the amount of
time that it has been irradiated. In those early days the period
was necessarily short, and often only two or three thousandths
of a gramme could be extracted from a single "slug". It was a
small but valuable amount and it provided the basis for working
out a process.

Dr. Spence told me of the extreme lengths to which they
went to conserve these stocks. "By the time the U.K. team was

96 ATOM HARVEST

ready to start on its own project", he told me, "we had as-
sembled enough for our purposes. We did this by deputing four
of our little team exclusively to the job of initially extracting
the plutonium from the fuel elements by a fairly straight-
forward process, and then, after we had finished with it, of ex-
tracting it again from the many different sorts of residue
resulting from our experiments/'

" We used to work in such a way that we ran through our pro-
cess in the same time scale and with the same concentrations we
hoped to use in the British plant. The amount present in the
Clinton slugs, of course, was far less than we hoped to have
after long periods of irradiation, so we had to concentrate it
and work with very small volumes in order to cut out at
least one of the many sources of error in our work."

The British workers had altogether for their work only
twenty-five thousandths of a gramme of plutonium, not more
than would cover a pinhead. They used about half of this in
"one run".

The Americans learned through their liaison officer at Chalk
River that the British had developed methods different from
their own. "We thought it would do quite a lot of good for
them to know we could master the problem on our own and
that this might make them more ready to collaborate with us ",
said Dr. Spence. "They, in their turn, saw that we had a
process and thought it would be profitable to learn more
about it."

As a result, collaboration in the chemical field, which had
ceased in 1942, reopened just a little in 1948. The Americans
invited the British and the Canadians to join them in a confer-
ence on processing at the Argonne National Laboratory.

"The exchange showed that in general principles the flow
sheets were amazingly similar although in detail quite different.
The exchange was valuable to us, too, but it was and still is
limited to discussion on chemical and chemical engineering
principles up to and including the pilot stage. It does not
include major chemical engineering processes."

Back in London at Shell-Mex House, home of the Ministry
of Supply, a small nucleus of workers were submerged in
drawings, plans and schedules, research contracts inherited

HARWELL IS BORN 97

from the old Tube Alloys organisation, and by streams of
letters, telegrams, phone calls from men and women enquiring
about chances of working in the project. Mr. D. R. Willson,
the secretary at Harwell, whose writings in Harlequin are a mine
of information on those early days, records how the rising tide
of applicants, in fact, threatened almost to engulf the organisa-
tion as it struggled to place new men while sorting out the
future of others who were by now returning from America and
Canada. Grades and salaries had to be fixed and accommoda-
tion in many cases had to be arranged.

Harwell, it must be remembered, was in the "wilds" of
Berkshire. You could not just plant a few thousand scientists,
engineers, secretaries and the like at the side of the road and
leave them to make their own arrangements. In February 1946
a conference was summoned to talk the matter over and to
try and make some sort of assessment of the accommodation
and other administrative requirements, and numbers of pre-
fabricated houses were ordered. There were such things as
stores to be thought about, also, where people could do their
shopping, and transport to get them to the nearest village some
miles away.

By the autumn of 1946 the site had already been transformed.
R.A.F. blocks were being turned into laboratories, hangars
were being adapted to house large instruments and machine
tools, and everywhere there were deep trenches being dug to
house the various service pipes and drains, so that travelling
within the perimeter became a continual hazard. The security
fence was at that stage more symbolic than functional.

Martin Fishenden, now head of the Division of Scientific
Administration, recalls a day during that period when, as a
visitor, he called on the establishment and filled in the various
passes and forms at the police post near the main gate. He
passed the night with friends working at the establishment in
their prefabricated bungalow outside the fence. The following
morning, having become initiated into the domestic secrets of
the establishment, he made an informal entry through a hole
in the fence.

As Wing-Commander Henry Arnold, the establishment's
chief security officer, pointed out, a scientifically qualified
7

98 ATOM HARVEST

Russian spy could have found out very little at that time about
their intentions if he had toured the establishment.

Arnold, the man who was instrumental in unmasking Fuchs,
the spy, is a man whose extreme restlessness picks him out at
once. Thin and wiry, his eyes are always alert and he has a good
sense of humour and lives up to his belief that the secret of
being a good security officer is to be a good mixer. His father
was a professor of the violin at the Royal Academy of Music in
London and used to like playing the cello and the piano, too.

Arnold went early into the Bank of England in 1911, but
when war broke out he joined the Royal Flying Corps as a
scout, the early equivalent of a fighter pilot, in 32 Squadron
at Ypres. He was shot down in 1917 and went back as an in-
structor afterwards until the end of the war. He returned to the
Bank of England on general tasks of auditing the bank's accounts,
and when the war broke out again was senior superintendent
of the bank's audit department. In World War II he went into
Intelligence and became chief security officer at the Ministry
of Aircraft Production and in addition had the task of covering
the preparations for the bombing of the German dams. After-
wards, he returned to the Bank of England and while there was
asked if he could suggest names for a chief security officer for
Harwell. He put up several but the Ministry of Supply finished
up by asking him if he would undertake the job himself, and
he agreed to do so.

Arnold has no regrets. He likes working with the atom men,
he tells me, and from what I could gather the atom men like
working with Arnold. They have in him a man who quietly,
tactfully but quite firmly perseveres at his task without causing
bad feeling or an undue feeling of restriction.

I saw a lot of Martin Fishenden. As chief of scientific adminis-
tration he accepted the task of making arrangements whenever
I asked to meet one of the scientific staff. His task at Harwell
is an extremely responsible one. He is also personal assistant to
the director.

Fishenden's mother is a "don" at the Imperial College of
Science in London, working on heat-transfer problems. His

HARWELL IS BORN 99

father compiles Penrose Annual, journal of the printing trades.
Martin himself is married to an artist of some distinction who
is responsible for several paintings in riotous colour that break
up the dreary Ministry of Works distemper on his office walls,
and they have two children, a boy and a girl. He came to
Harwell from radar work at the Telecommunications Research
Establishment, Malvern, in the rather ordinary grade of senior
scientific officer. He wears sports jackets, hates being quoted,
and to the outsider gives the impression of continually striving
to be just like everybody else.

He has straight black hair and is somewhat dark-skinned.
Although he is in his middle thirties and often wears a heavy
frown, there is a suggestion of the schoolboy in his face that is
emphasised when he grins. He loves fast cars, had an Aston
Martin at T.R.E. and now drives a i-litre Riley that runs
away with most of the prizes in cross-country races arranged by
the establishment staff. One of his secret " vices" is said to be
that of standing for long periods on railway bridges noting par-
ticulars of passing engines, and his colleagues are much amused
by cryptic postcards that reach him from friends travelling
abroad and tell enthusiastically of record runs in continental
expresses.

One of the men that Fishenden took me to see was Glasgow-
born Dr. H. M. Finniston, forty-two-year-old chief of the Metal-
lurgy Division. The group of untidy-haired, serious youths
in the early twenties who were discussing a point with him over
cups of tea in his roomy office when we arrived might have been
any tea-break group of graduate students in a university re-
search department. Finniston's full Glaswegian tones could
easily be heard above the rest. He motioned me to a seat at
a boardroom-sized table and swept away the cups in one wide
gesture of his large hands. Several of the group tried to pin him
down to a time for further discussion of one of their problems
but he deftly evaded the move.

"One of our chief problems here", he said, turning to me,
"is that everybody in Atomic Energy is extremely hard-driven.
We are trying to compress the time-scale in which everything
is being done. If you consider that in something like ten years
we have moved from the point where we had nothing at all to

IOO ATOM HARVEST

one where we are introducing plans to spend 300 million you
can see we are moving something. I think, sometimes, that we
should stop and think whether we are backing the right horse
or not. Mind you, I think we shall succeed, but we may be
rushing too quickly on the grounds that we are largely ignorant
of what is round the corner. And by taking the easiest and more
obvious path we may be side-tracking ourselves from the main
stream on which it will develop in ten years' time."

At that moment he caught my eye searching the wall for the
customary clock that adorns the wall of almost every Harwell
room. "I won't have a clock", he told me, shaking his head of
curly, greying black hair. "Clocks are nothing but a nuisance.
I told them to leave my office without one. You cannot time
work of this sort."

One of Dr. Finniston's big headaches is the devising of fuel
elements for reactors that will permit longer periods of irradia-
tion and higher working temperatures.

"The problem that you are faced with is this," he told me,
"that you start with a piece of uranium metal that consists of
two sorts of atoms, one of which splits into two new atoms when
fission takes place. These new atoms or fission products go
hurtling through the solid metal disrupting the lattice and
creating a disorder which has profound effects on the material.
Although the new atoms are each only about half as heavy as
the original atom, they still occupy approximately the same
space, so that even when they come to rest the problem still
remains that you have got to find space for two atoms where
before there was only one."

Finniston went to his blackboard and drew on it what looked
like a lot of closely packed cells in a honeycomb, to demonstrate
how the fission process set up stresses within the fuel rods.

"The new atoms that you now have are a very different type
of atom from the ones you started off with", he went on. "You
are in fact forming a very complex alloy. In some cases, where
the newly formed atoms are gases like xenon and krypton, you
have a further complication." There may be so much gas
trapped in the uranium that a given piece occupies 40 per cent
more volume than before.

Uranium and plutonium have the further peculiarity that

HARWELL IS BORN IOI

they are "anisotropic" in certain ranges of temperature. That
is to say, they may have different physical properties in different
directions. Uranium may expand in one direction, for example,
when it gets hot and contract in another, which is a most un-
usual phenomenon. Even these properties are not consistent
over the whole of its solid state, since each of these metals passes
through a succession of phases in which it behaves quite
differently.

Uranium goes through three such phases, the alpha, beta
and gamma phases. Plutonium, instead, has six, and within
each of these separate brackets the behaviour of the metal is
completely different. Both metals are extremely reactive with
the atmosphere and with water when they are hot.

"What you have to do, if you are using solid fuel, which is the
usual form, is to put the uranium into a can with which the fuel
itself will not react and which will not burst under the various
radiation effects. Over short periods of irradiation this problem
is being solved, but when you begin to consider long burning
periods the problem of radiation damage becomes one of the
first magnitude. To find out more about this we have to leave
rods in for varying periods under careful observation and then
examine them to see what has happened.

"You see how big our task is and why I talked about rushing
it, when I remind you that we are carrying out here a thorough
investigation of the properties of six metals new to technology
and of phenomena new to engineers and metallurgists. No
normal industrial organisation would be asked to carry out such
a task. There are research organisations that concentrate on
iron and steel, on aluminium or copper. The task we have is
that of investigating the properties of at least two sorts of
uranium, of plutonium, zirconium, beryllium, niobium,
vanadium and, of course, any other metals that physicists or
engineers think may improve reactors."

Finniston warmed to his subject. "Just think of the condi-
tions under which we work. Before you can examine a metal
specimen under a microscope in a normal laboratory you need
to machine it and polish it and probably etch it with acid.
Throughout all these operations you have every opportunity of
easy manipulation.

IO2 ATOM HARVEST

"Many of our specimens are so toxic that before we can work
with them at all we have to wear special protective clothing
from head to foot and operate in sealed boxes through gloves.
Remember, Bertin," he went on, "it can be dangerous if we
swallow only a tiny speck of plutonium dust. Once a specimen
has been in the pile we can no longer deal with it directly.

"Machining, polishing and etching must all be done under
the most trying conditions of remote control behind ten-inch-
thick lead shields. Any man who attempts to examine such
specimens through a microscope would lose his eyes."

At Harwell they use television instead for such work. Again,
where a research scientist in a conventional laboratory would
examine the properties of a metal with the aid of equipment
mounted on the usual laboratory bench, experiments on metals
used in the construction of atomic piles have to be carried out
at the bottom of a hole forty feet deep and only four inches wide
that reaches down into the very heart of the reactor and down
which you cannot look directly.

To meet the needs of some engineers to inspect these centres
Ronald Coleman of Pye, who designed the underwater TV
camera which first located pieces of the Comet off Elba, pro-
duced a new form of remote-controlled camera with an "eye 59
that can be made to look in any direction. The whole unit was
only four inches in diameter. With the aid of such a device the
most searching inspection could also be made of structures
right inside the pile.

[9]

Factories are Planned

IT is difficult, more than ten years afterwards, to appreciate
what it meant in the immediate post-war years to start build-
ing a whole new industry. There were shortages of labour and
of scientists and engineers, of steel, coal and generating equip- .
ment, and of almost all the materials that industry needed.
There were restrictions on building in order to give the housing
programme a chance, and even hospitals and schools had to
wait years for permission to make good the scars of war.

Industrial firms that had been compulsorily confined to
the manufacture of weapons and other strategic equipment
throughout the war years were busily trying to recruit all the
good men they could in an attempt to regain their old markets
and find new ones. Overcrowded universities were unable to cope
with their insatiable demand for more engineers and scientists.

In the midst of all this industrial reorganisation, on Janu-
ary 29, 1946, came an announcement of the Government's
decision to build up a great atomic energy organisation capable
of manufacturing nuclear explosive on a large scale. It was an
objective that could clearly only be attained at the expense of
a vast drain on resources. Firms would have to interrupt newly
established production lines to satisfy small orders, unlikely to
be repeated, of special machines and unusual materials, and all
to unheard-of specifications.

The decision taken was a courageous one and it has since paid
dividends, but it is fair to say that no-one at that time had the
slightest idea how hard the task was they had set themselves.
Basically, it meant, in addition to the setting up of the research

103

EXTRACTION OF

URANIUM FROM

THE ORE

MANUFACTURE
OF METAL

\

MANUFACTURE OF
HEXAFLUOR1DE

METAL

TRANSMUTED
TO PLUTONIUM

IN PILES

i

A 1 PARTLY

I I ENRICHED

DEPLETED \^ MS

METAL / %

>' \

\ -*> .'

\ <^-^
% |^M

WAR POTENTIAL PEACE POTENTIAL

Crude uranium ore must be carefully processed before it can be used as
fuel in reactors. The journey is much longer and more complicated when
the final product needed is for explosives or as pure fuel for more advanced
types of reactor.

FACTORIES ARE PLANNED 105

establishment at Harwell, the erection of a number of factories
where ore from the Belgian Congo would be processed into
uranium metal, made into fuel elements, transmuted into
plutonium and then made into bombs. On the face of it, and
at least to many uninitiated politicians, it seemed as if the whole
process had been set out quite simply in the newspapers.

The fact that the initial task of supplying plutonium for
bombs was completed on schedule and that the firm basis was
laid in record time for peaceful exploitation of atomic power
depended to a great extent on a few engineers like Sir Chris-
topher Hinton and Mr. Leonard Owen, his deputy, who
provided a driving force that never flagged.

It is, in fact, true to say that the industrial applications of
atomic energy in Britain are as inseparable from the name of
Hinton as are atomic research from that of Sir John Cockcroft
and atomic weapons from that of Sir William Penney. Sir
Christopher, who, as one of the Atomic Energy Authority's
"five knights",* directs the industrial group, has been associ-
ated with the organisation almost from the moment the British
Government took its first decision to set up the project.

His fine brain, coupled with a tremendous and unrelenting
driving force, have been the main factors in the birth of a great
organisation worth hundreds of millions of pounds. No man is
entitled to more credit than he for the magnificent and coura-
geous programme of nuclear power production on which the
country has now embarked.

Hinton, at the outbreak of war, had been borrowed from
I.C.I, by the Ministry of Supply and made deputy director-
general of the great Filling Factories organisation, which in six
years built up to the point where nine very big factories and
seven smaller ones were employing 135,000 people. These
factories took empty shells and explosives made by others and
filled the cases, preparing all the ammunition, including the
big blockbuster bombs, for the three Services. It was a terrific
task and Hinton showed himself more than adequate for it.

* The "five knights", the five full-time directors of the United Kingdom
Atomic Energy Authority, are : Sir Edwin Plowden (Chairman), Sir
Donald Perrott (member for finance and administration), Sir John
Cockcroft, Sir Christopher Hinton, and Sir William Penney.

IO6 ATOM HARVEST

In the latter half of 1945 one of the big jobs of the filling
organisation was to run the factories down. It took some doing.
As usual with Sir Christopher, it was done to a programme, and
this programme let him out of the organisation at the end of 1 945.

The Ministry of Supply, however, was already looking round
for someone to build up the new chain of factories for the manu-
facture of atomic fuel and explosives. Sir Christopher, who
keeps his own diary, could find no record when I queried him
about the first approach that he received. "I think that at the
time it must have been too secret to record", he told me. It
seems, however, that it was probably in October 1945.

He remembers that he showed interest in the idea. The first
entry that referred to formation, still unannounced, of the
British production organisation was on December 13. On that
day he saw the Director of Establishments at the Ministry of
Supply to arrange about starting a London office. Five days
later he had his first technical meeting.

The discussion was with Mr. Perrin, who had been personal
assistant to Sir Wallace Akers in Tube Alloys throughout the
war and was later to carry on the same task for Lord Portal of
Hungerford when he was appointed Controller. With Perrin,
he went through all that was known of the various processes.

Hinton had still said nothing to Owen, his engineering direc-
tor and close friend. They were both due to leave the filling
factories a few days before Christmas. Owen, who worked at
Westminster House in Horseferry Road, recalls the day when
he loaded his personal belongings into his car for the last time
and drove round to Shell-Mex House in the Strand where
Hinton worked. "I gave him a hand to get his stuff into the car
and while I was in his office the telephone bell rang", he says.
" It was Wilmot, Minister of Supply at the time, asking to see
Hinton. After about half an hour he came back and told me we
had both been offered a new job. He said it was to build atomic
energy factories. I asked him: 'What the hell is atomic energy?'
says Owen and he replied that he was not so sure that he
knew himself."

Owen recalls how all his reactions were against the idea at
first. "We had both had a very strenuous war and we were
looking forward to going back to industry."

FACTORIES ARE PLANNED

As they drove from London to their homes in the North,
they discussed the matter together. Hinton, who had already
had a chance to go into the matter more deeply, says he was
already sold on the idea. The one thing he had insisted upon
was that he should not be limited in scope to purely military
applications.

"What I felt", Sir Christopher told me in retrospect, "was
that the Government were obviously setting extreme impor-
tance on the development of atomic energy from the defence
point of view, and I felt that if on top of that we could put
enough skill and energy into it, we could go further. I had
asked for and received an assurance that it was not intended
that work should be confined to the defence industry alone and
that we should be able to build up an industrial organisation.
It was always in my mind from the outset that on a sufficient
scale it might be of immense importance for the country. I was
always out to break into the industrial field, but I think I had
certainly realised that it was going to be a hell of a struggle."

In the middle of January a meeting was arranged between
Cockcroft, Hinton and Owen. "We were still not keen enough
about it all to come down to London," says Owen, "so the
meeting was arranged half way on neutral ground in a hotel
near the main station at Crewe." To those who know the place
as it was then no comment is necessary. Circumstances could
not have been less auspicious, but Cockcroft was full of en-
thusiasm. "He brought out the newness and pioneering nature
of the job," says Owen, "which was something that appealed to
Hinton and myself."

A few days later the Prime Minister announced in Parlia-
ment the setting up of the production organisation under the
leadership of Lord Portal of Hungerford. Sir Christopher
Hinton (he was still plain "Mr." then) was given the job of
designing, building and operating the necessary factories.

"We did several things very quickly indeed", Owen told me.
"One was to take this office at Risley. It was one of the biggest
of the filling factories. Most of its 1,300 acres had been signed
over to the Admiralty for use as their main storage depot in the
North. We were just in time to place a caveat on this one corner,
a few acres or so. We could have chosen London but office

108 ATOM HARVEST

accommodation was not easy to find. Risley had in its favour
the fact that it was in the middle of the heavy chemical and
heavy engineering industry. We put our claws on the place.

"The next move was immediately to get in touch with some
of our old staff. Kendall jumped at it. People like Disney, one
of my chief engineers now, jumped at it. Men were also taken
on in two or three junior grades. By February 1946 this band
of about a dozen moved in here and started looking round for
paper and envelopes and the like. Luckily we had food laid on
from a Ministry of Supply canteen."

When Owen met Cockcroft he had asked him about literature.
Cockcroft told him that he would get a pretty good idea about
it all from the Smyth Report. Hinton and Owen examined it
together. They both agreed that it was a masterly work. It told
them nothing, however, about the way to design the plant they
needed.

Owen himself is a Liverpool man. Right through his life his
hobby has been sailing boats. He first learned on the Mersey
while he was at Liverpool College. Later he was to sail on the
"flashes" of Cheshire formed by rivers overflowing into subsi-
dences caused by salt-mining.

When the First World War broke out, Owen joined the
Liverpool Regiment. Afterwards, he went back to Liverpool
and gained a City Scholarship to the university, the best of the
sort that could be got. He secured first-class honours in engin-
eering and went to I.C.I., "taking my sailing with me".

I met Owen first in his office in the atomic energy industrial
group's headquarters at Risley. They are a spartan set of build-
ings, the remains, as Owen said, of one of the filling factories.
Most of them were prefabricated huts. There was one single-
storey brick-built structure. With a second storey later to be
added, it served the senior officers of the group right through
until the end of 1955.

Owen's office, like all the rest, had few trappings. The furni-
ture was of the very simplest and there was a water-colour or
two on the wall done by architects of the Ministry of Works
during the construction stages of the production piles at Wind-
scale. By his table was a group photograph of engineers associ-
ated with the first days of the project.

FACTORIES ARE PLANNED IOg

Owen himself was a round-faced man in his middle fifties.
He wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and during the interview
smoked continually. "It has been an enthralling job for the
engineers who have had the opportunity of building this thing
up," he said, "and, while on the subject of engineers, let me
tell you, it is a lot of bunk talking of atomic energy as so many
people do in the Press and elsewhere as if it was something
exclusively scientific. I am not being derogatory about scien-
tists. This sort of thing all started with people like Lord Ruther-
ford, and the whole conception of atomic structure was the
result of masterly scientific work, but once you have got past
that point it is the engineer, the industrial chemist and the
operator who give you the material.

"I will have nothing said against the scientists," he went on,
"but the people this country needs most today are the men who
can understand what the scientist's idea is and put it into prac-
tice in brick, mortar, iron and steel. These are the chaps we
are trying to get here, and they are in awfully short supply. We
are always trying to get more engineers of the sort who can
discuss all the different aspects of the many specialisations, the
operations side under Ross, the development side under
Rotherham, the scientific side with teams at Harwell, and
can chat with the secretarial and administrative types about
Treasury considerations and with the doctors about health. Your
design engineer takes all this into account. He then takes a
decision on how to build whatever is wanted.

" I think you should realise how engineering men like me
tick", Owen went on. "Any B.F. can do a job given enough
time and money, but the engineer that I am after is one who
can build a factory as quickly as possible and as cheaply as
possible, and that will produce the goods at an economic cost.
He must be able to complete his task within the estimate given
to his boss of what it was going to cost and of the time it was
going to take."

That statement of Owen's represented the "credo" of the
production group. "Anyone who breaks these * musts' here",
he told me, "is in for considerable trouble. I gather people
around me who believe in them."

He instanced the task he had been given early in the project

110 ATOM HARVEST

of building a factory to produce uranium metal as fuel for the
first reactor. "I put a first-class fellow named Turner in charge
with the title of Chief Engineer and made him responsible for
completing the Springfields factory. The remit received from the
Ministry of Supply was to take ore from the Belgian Congo and
turn it out as cartridges suitable for the pile.

"The development work was done by chemists of the general
chemical group of I.C.I., who were doing the laboratory work.
That was in April 1946. Within a month or two, using their
chemical flow-sheet, we had got out the first engineering flow-
sheet and the first estimate of cost. That was the start. The esti-
mate then went to the Treasury, and said in effect : ' To build
this sort of uranium factory we need so much money 5 . Under
me, my chief engineer was entirely responsible, and when I say
'entirely' I mean it."

One of the biggest problems at the time, Owen told me,
emphasising the point already made by Dr. Finniston at Har-
well, was that of making suitable cartridges for canning the
uranium in a way that would protect it from corrosion and
would make it last a really long time. The problem still remains.
"Give me a good uranium cartridge", he told me, "and I will
give you a pile. It is almost as easy as that. The cartridge is one
of the main problems of the moment in atomic energy. It is one
that we are gradually solving."

Owen said one of their greatest difficulties was getting men.
"There are two sorts of good man", he said. "Some have come
up the hard way, and some the easy way. The hard way is the
working-class home, followed by the serving of an apprentice-
ship and attendance at night school; the getting of the National
Certificate, and then a start in a junior position."

He quoted examples of the two extremes. "Take Harry
Cartwright. He got his First in the Mechanical Sciences Tripos
at Cambridge, spent several years with the Royal Air Force
during the war, and afterwards took a pupillage with English
Electric. He came here in the lowest grade of design engineer but
quickly showed great aptitude and is now carrying very con-
siderable responsibility."

Owen's face showed obvious pleasure as he told me of a
typical example of" the other way ". It was that of Jack Tatlock,

FACTORIES ARE PLANNED III

a thirty-one-year-old "E.i", or Engineer ist class, who had
already gained an M.B.E. for work with the project. Tatlock
is a Bolton man, tactiturn and shy, and not at all keen to talk
about himself. He came to Risley straight from apprenticeship
as a draughtsman in the early days. He worked well and studied
hard, putting the job first and his own prospects second.

Tatlock now works under Kendall, the engineer who built
the Windscale piles and is engaged now on a far more tricky
task, the breeder reactor at Dounreay. He had quickly gained
professional qualifications as an engineer, and, says Kendall,
"is now one of my best designers". Among his many duties he
is secretary of a "design committee 53 consisting of senior en-
gineers, research and development people and production men.
"When the discussion has been getting a bit wordy, I've seen
him quietly drive straight into the conversation and sum up the
position," Kendall told me.

Tatlock is by no means an isolated case. Owen told me there
were many others like him. "The opportunities in this growing
organisation far outnumber the men ready to take advantage
of them, and the chances of promotion are unlimited."

Owen believes in pushing his men hard, as does Sir Chris-
topher. "If you get the right sort of chaps and form the right
sort of team, they will, I think, be quite hurt if you are not
pushing them hard. The happiest times", he said, "have always
been those when there was far too much to do."

The big complaint now is that the organisation is getting too
big. Owen is a firm believer in leadership. "Hinton is an ideal
leader with his eye firmly fixed on a star," he said, "but
personal leadership can only go through so many people and
after that it inevitably becomes a bit remote to some. There
was a time in 1946 when we were only about a hundred strong
and we all knew every draughtsman and the names of his
children. Now, instead, we are growing into one of the biggest
industrial organisations in the country and it is no longer so.
It just couldn't be."

From Owen I learned more of those early days about which
so little has ever been committed to paper. With Kendall's help
he pieced together the story of the famous first meeting of "the
twelve apostles". The story goes that on February 4, 1946,

112 ATOM HARVEST

twelve men of all ranks, forming the nucleus of the Pro-
duction Division, arrived in Risley from the four corners of
England and moved into their new headquarters for the first
time. " Of this group only one man knew anything about atomic
energy", says the official report. "The first thing done was to
call a meeting of the whole group and ask the one informed
member, who had spent some time at the Canadian project,
to tell the rest in simplest terms what atomic energy was/'

Memories, I found, were short and it was some time before I
was able to collect the names of those present. There were, it
seems, thirteen of them, but one more or less at that stage made
very little difference and no-one then or later was disposed to
regard the meeting as unlucky. Apart from Sir Christopher,
Owen and Kendall, there were, I was told, Harold Disney and
Dennis Ginns, Leslie Cole, Donald Mackey, Johnny Farthing,
Bill Parsons, John Antwis, Robert Hart, Ken Sheard and
Charles Turner.

They all had a simple lunch in a canteen formerly used by
the filling factory staff and then filed into a tiny room, almost
devoid of furniture, that is now used as a library. There was a
small table there and a few folding chairs. The proceedings were
very informal. The one knowledgeable man was Dennis Ginns.
He was an engineer who had been in Canada designing heavy
water reactors but had been taken ill and returned to Britain.
While he was recovering, I.C.I., from whom he had been
seconded, agreed to his helping the atomic energy project with
his knowledge for a year or so.

" We asked Ginns to tell us exactly what a reactor was, or at
least something of the principles involved ", says Owen. "Dennis
did this, telling us about the Canadian reactor, of the possibili-
ties of using heavy water or graphite, and why we needed these
substances at all. He talked, I suppose, for an hour or so."

"That is all very well," said Owen in his blunt way at the
end of the discourse, "but what makes the ruddy thing start to
begin with?" He was used, he said, to industrial plant where
you had to turn valves or push a switch down, but was baffled
by a device that seemed to have no need of them.

Ginns explained that there was always the "odd neutron
kicking around in the atmosphere" that would start off the

FACTORIES ARE PLANNED 113

reaction. Other questions were asked about the purity of the
heavy water or graphite and other components that would be
required.

"We had at that time", says Owen in retrospect, "very little
realisation of what we were in for. The first task, having got
some idea of what a reactor was, was to set up an organisa-
tion to start the job off. We had many hectic meetings at the
time to discuss the remit that we had from the Ministry, in-
cluding that part of it which required us to build a water-
cooled reactor along the lines of the ones at Hanford, used by
the Americans to produce plutonium."

The British knew nothing of Hanford. The Americans just
would not let our engineers see the piles there, so that there was
a good deal of groping in the dark. One thing was quite clear,
and that was that a factory would be needed to start off with to
refine uranium, and Charles Turner, now Chief Engineer,
responsible for chemical plant, was asked to study this.

Hanging over their heads was the great immutable date, the
day on which they had to hand over to Sir William Penney the
plutonium he needed for the Monte Bello test.

Meanwhile, with the exception of Sir Christopher Hinton,
Owen, Turner, Disney and Ginns, all of whom had homes in
the Northwich area, the whole team were accommodated in
primitive conditions in the nearby Newchurch Hostel used by
miners. They slept on wooden plank beds with three "biscuit"
mattresses apiece. "The men there were an extremely good lot",
Kendall told me, "and you would not have placed the majority
as miners at all. A few of them were pigs, though. They de-
liberately came into the dining-rooms wearing their pit muck."

Kendall recalled that, when he first heard from Sir Chris-
topher, he thought it was part of a leg-pull by colleagues. It
was in war-time and Kendall was in Southport. The message
asked him to meet Hinton in London nearly 200 miles away.
The meeting took place at 10 o'clock one Sunday morning.
Owen was there. Kendall was offered an engineering post in
the filling organisation and accepted it.

"I found Hinton at first a bit difficult to get used to", he
told me. "I think it was his voice, which is a little high, a little
hard and metallic; an impersonal sort of voice. I soon began to
8

114 ATOM HARVEST

realise that the impression was a purely superficial one", he
said, and told me a story to show how human Sir Christopher
could be. "We were doodle-bugged at the Ministry, and I had
the job of clearing up the mess. There was no labour to be had
for the job and I had to bring in men from the filling factories.
The job took some time.

"The doodle-bugs, of course, were coming in across Sussex
and many were falling short. My wife and daughter were
living there at the time and Hinton knew that I was worried
about them. One day, without a word to me, he obtained their
telephone number and himself invited them to stay with his
wife in the North. They stayed first at the Hinton home and
then at the Owens'." One of Jennifer Kendall's most vivid
memories she was very small at the time was when Hinton,
who was 6 ft. 4 in., picked her up sometimes when he was at
home and swung her "round the Maypole" at what to her
seemed an enormous height above the ground.

There were many sides to Hinton. One Sunday morning,
when both Kendalls were spending a weekend break at the
Hinton home, Sir Christopher suddenly asked Kendall: "What
do you do about your churchgoing, James? ", to which Kendall,
a little taken aback, replied after a moment's hesitation, "I
usually delegate it to my family". "Oh, well," replied Sir
Christopher, "that's all right, because my family usually dele-
gates it to me." So off went Hinton to church with the Kendalls
while James himself peeled the potatoes for Lady Hinton.

Hinton at home was one thing. Hinton at work was another.
The team were working to a deadline and he was determined
that they should meet it. With Owen he had laid out a pattern
for the job.

Owen told me how they drew up their plans. "Every year
Hinton gets out a long-term programme. It is in effect a
'master' programme. After discussion it is adopted and at once
becomes one of our 'Bibles'. It may have only a couple of lines
on each job but it does give us a date. Without this method of
programming we would not succeed. We did this when we were
in the I.C.I.'s Alkali Division. Sir Christopher started it there.
It is one thing drawing up a programme, however, and quite
another thing meeting it. It must obviously have been drawn

FACTORIES ARE PLANNED 115

up judicially. There is no question of arbitrary fixed dates.
Only one date was arbitrary in the atomic energy programme
and that was the date on which he had to hand over the plu-
tonium needed by Sir William Penney. This was a political
decision. We had to accept or reject it. Once we had accepted
the date we had to get out our programme. Inside that date,
once agreed upon, nothing was arbitrary. It all fitted together
like a jigsaw puzzle."

Getting the bits from industry, while the country was working
on a sellers 5 market, was a difficult proposition in the early
years of the programme. The essential part was to have a really
good progress department. "Right from the start this depart-
ment goes into partnership with the industrial concerns", said
Owen. "It gets to know their difficulties, makes sure they have
licences, and if they are short of men helps them out. They have
to see that right from the start there is no excuse for missing the
date."

[10]

A Knight in a Duffle Coat

THE first thing that strikes one about Sir Christopher himself is
undoubtedly his height, and there is little wonder at that for he
is reputed to have been the tallest member of the Ministry of
Supply during the war-time period. His high domed forehead
and piercing eyes give one immediately the impression of a
man of great intellect, and when he starts to move his innate
vigour is at once apparent. He is clearly a man who never does
things by halves. Whenever I have seen him out of doors, he
has almost always been striding along in dynamic fashion. In
cold weather he often wears a duffle coat that emphasises, as I
later found his home did, too, the essentially functional nature
of his attitude to life.

In his spacious and tastefully furnished office at Risley he
rarely remains for long seated behind his large and highly
polished desk. He paces up and down in a most deliberate
fashion, tracing out imaginary patterns with his feet on the
thick carpet with tremendous care, hesitating here and there
between a left or right turn as if planning some new factory.
He emphasises his points with expressive gestures, sometimes
flinging his arms out wide and slowly bringing them together
in a squeezing motion as if he were playing a concertina.
Occasionally he will gaze out of the window as if in search of
inspiration. I several times followed his gaze. There were no
lovely pastoral scenes like those outside his own home; just a
couple of prefabricated grey buildings and a cloud or two in the
sky above; but they seemed to supply him with the words that
he was searching for and he would quickly return to his point.

116

A KNIGHT IN A DUFFLE COAT 117

One of the dominating features of his life, I had already
found, is the doctrine of the immutable deadline. A promise
must be kept. Another is a scorn of established procedures,
which he has learned by long experience. It is typified by his
attitude towards the use of pilot plant to test a process before
plans are made to use it on a major scale. The normal pro-
cedure in the chemical industry is one of caution. When a
procedure has been shown to work in the laboratory it is tried
out on a larger scale. If it still works the scale is increased.

"I believe, in the light of six years' experience in the atomic
energy business", he told me, "that the construction of pilot
plant can be a mixed blessing. The pilot-plant designer tends
to take the line that he need not be particular because it is, after
all, only a pilot plant. When the work is picked up by the de-
signer of the full-scale plant he then tends to argue that the
pilot plant may be inelegant, but at least it has been shown to
work and therefore it would be unwise to make modifications.
If instead the designer of the full-scale plant has to go ahead
from scratch, he really has to think for himself, and I believe
that although one is taking a heavier risk by doing things that
way better results are often achieved."

In support of that doctrine Sir Christopher quotes the case
of the plutonium extraction plant at Windscale, worth many
millions of pounds, that was designed solely on the basis of
experiments done in the Canadian laboratories by Dr. Spence
with no more plutonium than would cover a pinhead. "It is an
interesting fact", he told me, "that this has been our frequent
experience with atomic energy plant."

One of his chief worries, he told me, was the task of finding
senior engineers, especially in the design field. "Given time we
could bring our own engineers along, and that is what we are
trying to do. There are no senior engineers within the organisa-
tion that have not gone up two or three steps since they came
and virtually all our senior posts are filled in that way. Un-
fortunately we have been expanding so rapidly that it has been
virtually impossible to bring men on fast enough. The worst
shortage of all is of design engineers capable of earning 1,000
to 1,700 a year."

One of Sir Christopher's many interests is architecture. He

Il8 ATOM HARVEST

had a lot to do with the designing of the fine administrative
buildings of the Capenhurst factory and with the great six-
storied office buildings that will soon make his Risley head-
quarters a symbolic island in the flat and dreary Lancashire
plains and be far more in keeping with their status than is the
grim accommodation they now occupy.

Hinton has often been blamed by his staff for the fact that,
while the factories enjoyed priority in the provision of amenities
and good buildings, the people at the centre of the organisation
get nothing at all.

The trouble, as his Yorkshire-born personal assistant, John
Dixon, pointed out, has been that the Risley organisation itself
had no sense of permanency until atomic energy established
itself as an economic proposition. The Risley staff were there
to plan factories and they never knew what would happen when
the factories were finished. The other disadvantage was that,
through starting in an old ordnance factory, they always had
something there already that they could use. "If we had had
no canteen we could have built ourselves a new one, but since
there was one already there, never mind how shoddy, there was
not much we could do. It was the same with the offices. The
building industry was already overstretched and our people
thought they would be quite unjustified in lashing out and
building palaces."

Now there is no alternative. The Risley establishment is en-
circled by an Admiralty stores depot and both organisations
have built right up to the dividing fence. Apart from an old
spoil heap now being built on, there was no room for extra
buildings. The only thing to do is to go upwards. As each new
block goes up, so a few of the hutments will be pulled down to
make way for new buildings.

Sir Christopher sets the date at which atomic energy really
came into its own as 1952. In that year the first British atomic
weapon was tested and the design studies were completed for
the first economic nuclear power station. "It was not until that
year", he says, "that we really began to see our way through."

One of Hinton' s less direct ways of placing atomic energy on
the technological map was the Nuclear Engineering Society,
which he was instrumental in forming as far back as 1946, and

A KNIGHT IN A DUFFLE COAT IIQ

which has since grown to countrywide proportions. The present
chairman, Mr. Harry Morris, a forty-two-year-old Yorkshire-
born engineer with three lots of letters behind his name, told
me : " It was the brain-child of Sir Christopher and he has always
been the president. The original object was training. We had
just started a new industry and were recruiting staff from many
different walks of life, each bringing their own specialised
knowledge to serve the new field of atomic power. They had
to be shown the other side of the house; electrical engineers to
learn something of chemistry, for example, and chemists to
learn something of the mechanical side. To give them this train-
ing we had meetings once a fortnight and regularly brought
down celebrities to address us."

Sir Christopher often attends meetings himself, and now that
the society has grown in scope, membership and responsibili-
ties he is helping it forward in an important new step, that of
seeking incorporation as a private company.

Both Sir Christopher and Lady Hinton take part in the Risley
organisation's less formal activities, including the annual dinner
and dance, and both are a little sorry, I think, that the general
set-up there, and the dispersion of the homes of staff over a wide
area, do not favour community spirit to the same extent as in
some of the Authority's other establishments.

The Hintons were kind enough to invite me over to their own
home, "Sandyway", at Tarporley, twenty miles from Risley.
It is a pretty little cottage which they designed themselves. As
you approach it along a neat drive, well-chosen items of highly
polished antique metalwork immediately catch the eye. Most
of them, like the antique furniture, and brightly coloured china
that adorn the walls, are relics of earlier days when Sir Chris-
topher and Lady Hinton (they were "Mr. and Mrs." then)
used to love wandering round antique shops. "We never get
time to do that sort of thing now", said Lady Hinton, as she
showed me into a cosy drawing-room that looked out over
newly ploughed fields ("We love the pastoral scene"), to the
bunched pines, oaks and birches of the Petty Pool woods.
"Just look at that fine old Italian tray that we picked up, dusty
and covered with grime, in a poky little shop."

"My husband lives a quiet homely life and loves walking",

I2O ATOM HARVEST

Lady Hinton told me. The fine, well-kept garden was all his
own work. He loves flowers, and a collection of colour trans-
parencies of the herbaceous borders, which we looked at through
a collapsible viewing device, paid tribute at once to his ability
as a gardener and in his newly started hobby of colour photo-
graphy.

Hinton loves tennis and sometimes plays badminton and
golf at the nearby Winnington Hall Club, which belongs to
I.G.I. (Alkali), of which he was once a director.

The house, Lady Hinton told me, was their own idea. They
planned it together during that early post-war period when
floorspace and cost were severely restricted. Between them they
had clearly squeezed the utmost out of the regulations. It was
a most lovely house all over, but the pride of it was certainly
the kitchen. Well lit, long and wide, with a seven-yard array of
factory-made kitchen furniture, stainless-steel sink, time-con-
trolled electric stove, and several arrays of lovely china to lend
brilliant colour to the plain, light walls.

Lady Hinton says that the house is so easy to run that she
finds she can do most things herself. She is naturally proud of her
kitchen. She pointed out a large and useful plate-warmer just
inside the kitchen side of a wide service hatch. " We pass every-
thing through", she told me, "so people can see inside if they
want to, but then you don't mind if you have a kitchen like
this one."

At that moment a bell rang and Lady Hinton went to open
the front door to new visitors. I made my departure, still
marvelling at the way in which a man who works as intensely
as does Sir Christopher could find time to lavish on his home.

I heard of yet another side of Sir Christopher from Daphne
Whailing, a pretty, dark-haired Authority driver, who took me
back to Risley. "I always used to think of him as a bit of an
ogre, going by what some people said of him," she told me,
"until I was told one day to put on a new uniform to show him
because the girl for whom it was made was away. I went in
fear and trembling when I heard I had to show it off to Sir
Christopher."

It was a neat grey affair, not really like a uniform at all, and
with a lovely round hat of the sort that some air hostesses wear.

A KNIGHT IN A DUFFLE COAT 121

Hinton spent a good twenty minutes looking at it and com-
menting on the design. He explained that he did not think it
would be much fun for drivers wearing something that looked
definitely like a uniform when they had to put up in some hotel
at night on a long trip. "It does make you feel conspicuous
and uncomfortable, it is true," she told me, "but I never ex-
pected Sir Christopher to think about a little thing like that."

A Taste of Trouble

WHILE Turner was planning and building the Springfields
factory to process uranium ore with the advice of I.C.I, and
information gained by the old Tube Alloys group, Kendall was
told to cut his teeth on the design of BEPO, the first big British
experimental reactor. A group in Canada were hard at work
on this project but there was still not much information avail-
able. All they had to work on, in fact, at Risley were three pile
drawings and four or five full sketch sheets of specifications.
Shielding at this stage was providing quite a problem and in
May 1946 Kendall went over to Canada to chat with physicists
there.

"A most curious correspondence ensued", says Kendall.
"Many silly questions were put to John Robson and other
physicists there. It was the process of learning." Kendall
chuckled, as he rustled through faded and flimsy sheets of
airmail paper. One of the letters started: " Dear James, Here
are some results of further calculations on the shield . . ."and
ended abruptly after five or six pages of highly mathematical
equations with the sentence "Your trousers were despatched
from Deep River (the cantonment adjoining the Chalk River
plant) on May 23rd and should reach you in two or three weeks'
time. I hope they will fit."

Kendall does not recall whether the trousers fitted or not.
The important thing was that they solved their shield troubles,
which were mainly concerned with the fact that it could not
be a complete casing of concrete around the pile but must allow
instead for continuous access to the pile face to change fuel

122

A TASTE OF TROUBLE 123

elements and to insert and withdraw substances that needed
to be irradiated in the pile for varying periods.

BEPO was built in the form of a cube with sides each 26 ft
long. Twenty-eight thousand blocks were used. Although the
standard dimensions were 7^ in. by 7^ in. by 29 in., there were
so many minor variations in shape to allow for cooling, for
control rods of one sort or another, for various irradiation
cavities and for the fuel elements themselves, that 1,500 differ-
ent shapes of block were needed. They rested on a steel floor
six inches thick based on a central concrete plinth. The steel,
which also surrounds the pile itself, was thus able to protect the
concrete from the damaging effects of the neutron irradiation.

The problem of producing the graphite blocks was alone
enough to daunt the most enthusiastic engineer. When the
project started, there were few tools that would stand up to the
abrasive effect of this very hard form of carbon, and new forms
of tungsten steel, harder than any previously known, were de-
veloped for the purpose. The task of machining the blocks to
an accuracy of nearly a thousandth of an inch, a quarter of the
thickness of a normal sheet of paper, was tremendously com-
plicated by the fact that it had to be carried out in conditions
of cleanliness that rivalled those of a hospital operating theatre.
Even one part in one million of some impurities would have
rendered the product useless.

Workers, we are told, had to strip to the skin before entering
tke machine shops and put on specially laundered clothes, and
no-one who left could enter without going through the whole
process over again. When made, the blocks were stacked inside
the sealed-off concrete shield. Workers entering the vault had
to do so through a series of airlocks which ensured greater
pressure within the shield than without to keep out dust.

The whole of the 26-ft cube had to be completed to an
accuracy of 0*015 of an inch, the thickness of a heavy postcard,
and this was done by carefully selecting over- and undersized
blocks. There are 1,760 horizontal channels, but only the
central 888 of them are loaded with uranium and they form the
central reacting core, 20 ft long and 20 ft in diameter. The re-
maining graphite serves to reflect back some of the escaping
neutrons.

124 ATOM HARVEST

The " biological" shield surrounding the pile is 6 ft 6 in.
thick and is made of concrete that weighs 40 per cent heavier
than ordinary concrete. The inner 6-in.-thick steel plate ab-
sorbs most of the neutrons. The purpose of the concrete is to
absorb the gamma radiation, that is fast X-rays, emitted during
the chain reaction and also produced when neutrons hit the
steel shield. There had to be, of course, a hole through this
shield for each channel in the pile, and the two holes had to be
exactly in register. When the pile is in use these tubes are
plugged. Other exits, known as "thermal columns", are
plugged with graphite and permit neutrons of thermal, that is
low, energies to reach the exterior when needed for experi-
mental purposes.

Cooling air is sucked through the channels and the pile by
electric fans and discharged up a soo-ft-high chimney stack.
The slightly reduced pressure within the pile caused by this
suction process ensures that there will be no leak of radioactive
material from the shield into the room outside. The temperature
of the air after leaving the pile was about 80-90 degrees Centi-
grade, that is well below the temperature at which water
normally boils.

After the pile had been in operation for some time a water-
heater was installed in the hot air outlet duct. This was nor-
mally capable of handling 2,000 kilowatts and producing water
at 72 degrees Centigrade that was used to heat buildings of the
Research Establishment. In its own small way this was quite an
historical feature, for it represented the first attempt in the
world to make use of the heat from a nuclear reactor.

A month before Kendall was able to complete the building
of BEPO, he was switched to the job of building the big pro-
duction piles at Windscale. The completion and start-up of
BEPO was handed over to a Harwell engineering group.

All the time that the Harwell establishment was growing the
Risley team had been working like mad on the Windscale com-
plex. Hinton, although few knew it, had been given a deadline.
The remit from the Ministry, a closely guarded secret at the
time, had specified that Sir William Penney must have his
plutonium by August 1952 for an atomic weapon to be tested
the following October. That was the great immutable date

A TASTE OF TROUBLE 125

around which the whole of the atomic energy programme
revolved.

Inside that date and working back from it the Springfields
factory had to be built and producing the uranium metal, the
plutonium piles had to be constructed and run for a sufficient
period to transmute the necessary amount of uranium into
plutonium, and a separation plant had to be designed, built and
operated which would enable the few ounces of plutonium thus
produced in every ton of fuel to be extracted on a commercial
scale and delivered in the required state of purity.

There was no changing the deadline, and it is to their credit
that the production organisation never suggested such an
idea.

Early on, the design engineers had learned that construction
and operation of the giant atomic production reactors was only
one aspect of the problem. The chemical treatment of the fuel
elements after they had been irradiated for a period had proved
to be a problem of the first magnitude, and the construction of
plant for the purpose a task comparable with that of building
the piles themselves.

Charles Turner, who had designed the ore-processing factory,
was now asked to plan a separation plant for plutonium. The
more urgent task, however, was that of constructing the reactors
themselves. For security reasons full details have never been
given of these two great production reactors at Windscale but
a few outsiders like myself have had the privilege of seeing them,
and the general principles on which they work are now well
known.

The original request from the Government had been for
graphite-moderated, water-cooled piles, "like the Hanford
ones" which the Americans had used for their own bomb pro-
ject. At that time Dr. Erastus Lee was head of the technical
engineering section, and with Dennis Ginns and James Ken-
dall was given the job of planning them. They gave a great deal
of thought to the request for water-cooled piles and did a great
deal of work on the subject. Kendall tells me he still uses a piece
of aluminium water-piping, once intended to cool these piles,
as a sheath for the electrical resistance of his Canadian-made
electric razor.

126 ATOM HARVEST

An argument in favour of water was that its use as a coolant
permitted much more heat to be removed and consequently
allowed the piles to operate at a higher activity rate. The argu-
ment against ordinary water, as we have already seen, was that
it absorbs neutrons more rapidly than graphite does and that
if for any reason the supply of water failed the removal of this
source of neutron wastage would at once increase the scale of
the chain reaction.

It was true that the Hanford piles had been run for some
years without serious incident, but they had only run for
twelve months initially when they had to be shut down and
modified for safety reasons. The consequences of a " runaway"
might be serious, leading to the release of fission products and
contamination of the surrounding countryside. It was all very
well for the Americans to build such reactors in remote sites
hundreds of miles away from cities; it was quite a different
thing to consider building one anywhere in Britain.

The alternative was a gas-cooled pile. Du Fonts, the big
American chemical firm which built the Hanford piles, had,
we knew, recommended against gas cooling. "They thought",
said Kendall, "that in gas cooling the pumping power required
was far too great to make it a practical project. We were not
accepting that. We adopted the line that we could, by using
extended heat-transfer surfaces, that is to say, by fitting fins to
the fuel elements, by pressurising the system to make the gas
more dense and by injecting it into the centre of the pile where
heat was greatest, divide the power needed for pumping by a
factor as great as 27."

Lee and his team wrote a paper on the subject. By this time
there were quite a number of people at Harwell who had come
back from Canada, and one of them, Jack Diamond, now head
of the engineering department of Manchester University, sug-
gested that by using only one of these effects, the fin-shaped
fuel elements, gas cooling could still be a practical proposition.
Because of the urgency of the task and the desire to avoid any
more complications than were absolutely necessary, it was de-
cided to build the Windscale piles with fin-shaped fuel slugs
and to leave for later piles like the PIPPA reactors at Calder Hall
more complex developments like pressurisation.

A TASTE OF TROUBLE 127

In most essential respects the Windscale piles were much like
BEPO, the first of the large Harwell reactors, but this research
reactor had had a heat rating to start off with of only 6,000
kilowatts, equivalent to the same number of single-bar domestic
electric fires. The building of the two Windscale production
reactors, each producing heat equivalent to the furnaces of a
large electric power station, was quite another matter. Al-
though safety considerations had seemed considerably simplified
by the decision to use gas and not water cooling, it was still
undesirable to have these, the first big piles in Britain, on the
outskirts of a large city.

Safety requirements were in fact thought to be much the
same as those of an ordinary explosives factory and the obvious
thing to do was to look round for just such a factory which was
no longer being used. There were two available on the West
Cumberland coast. The better of them was at Sellafield. This
site had many advantages. It was near the sea and its use for
industrial purposes was consistent with long-term planning in
the area. There was water available, office buildings and rail-
way sidings, and these facilities probably reduced by a year the
time taken to complete the factory. The name Windscale was
given to the new factory, and work on laying out the site started
in September 1947.

Some idea of the size of the factory can be gained from the
fact that 300 professional men, architects, surveyors, engineers
and the like, and up to 5,000 construction workers were needed
for the task. Apart from the two atomic piles with their enor-
mous chimneys, each 415 ft high, and the many-storied
chemical processing plant, all the normal factory services had
to be built, boiler-house, offices, stores, workshops, surgery,
fire station and the rest. By November labourers from Ireland
were brought in, and gangs were opening up and clearing the
300-acre area and buildings, hutted camps, canteens, and other
amenities for some thousands of workers who had to be brought
in to supplement the local labour force.

In the case of plutonium production piles, of course, there
needed to be no facilities for experimentation and this im-
mediately simplified the task of constructing the biological
shield. Firstly, it reduced the number of channels that were

128 ATOM HARVEST

required. Secondly, it meant that, where at Harwell radiation
from the pile to the exterior had to be reduced to a point where
it would have no effect on delicate instruments used for experi-
ments just outside the shield, in the case of the production re-
actors it was quite sufficient to reduce escaping radiation to a
level where it would do no harm to workers.

The graphite and uranium core of the reactor itself weighed
many thousands of tons, and by the time the foundations, the
fan-houses and the 3,ooo-ton chimney had been added in, the
total weight of each pile was 57,000 tons. A great deal had to be
known about the terrain that was to bear a weight of this order
and holes had to be drilled to discover its exact nature and the
way it would react when subjected to a heavy load.

Engineers decided that the best way to deal with this prob-
lem was to put each pile, complete with all its related equip-
ment, chimneys and the like, on to a great reinforced concrete
mat, 200 ft long, 100 ft wide and 10 ft thick. The various struc-
tures upon it were carefully planned to counter-balance each
other and to ensure that there was no chance of a subsequent
tilt. It meant that the heaviest loads needed to be positioned
with an accuracy of inches. In the concrete work errors were
not allowed of more than half an inch in 100 feet, and tubes
running through the shield had to be placed with the same
accuracy.

The major item, of course, was the cooling system. Each of
the piles would produce continuously energy equivalent to that
used by a small city and it all had to be extracted. The blower
houses at Sellafield are an impressive sight. The fans used are
like huge, multi-bladed paddlewheels and are totally encased.
The principle used is similar to that of windmills lately devised
by the Dutch to pump water from reclaimed land. They are
driven by powerful electric motors which consume enough
current between them to run a large motorcar factory; the
great hall trembles, the air vibrates, and one feels for all the
world as if the great motors had put out an invisible hand to
grasp one's inside and shake it violently. In periods with "little
ships" in the Royal Navy, I have satisfied myself that I am not
the sort of person who is easily seasick, but I dreaded every
moment during my visit to the fan-houses that I was going to

A TASTE OF TROUBLE I2g

disgrace myself and longed for the time when my guide would
press on to the next section.

There are two of these fan-houses for each pile, to secure a
balanced airstream, and they pump air through a subterranean
channel into the bottom of the pile core. Since any particles of
dust entering with the air would be radioactivated by passage
through the pile, most stringent filtering arrangements are
necessary on the air intakes, and further precautions must be
taken before the heated air can be allowed through the chim-
neys into the air above. Filters of this sort must be strong to
stand up to such an airstream. How strong they need to be can
be imagined from the fact that when the fans were first switched
on the fall of pressure in the fan-houses caused even the great
steel doors of the building to belly inwards several inches.

There were many worse trials than that for the engineers.
While the first of the great chimneys was still in an elementary
stage, some tens of feet only from the ground, a message came
from Sir John Cockcroft, who was in America, warning that
experiments there had shown unexpected risks of leakage of
radioactive material from the fuel elements.

If the deadline were to be satisfied, there would be no time
to take the chimney to pieces again and install further filters,
nor could modifications be introduced into the second one,
shortly to be started. The expensive decision was taken to make
the whole of the 4i5-ft chimney a parallel tube in each case
instead of a tapered one as had originally been intended. The
filters would be housed at the very top and would, incidentally,
make the chimneys unique.

Another trial for the engineers came in the early days of
testing. When the blowers were worked, they found the chim-
neys got wet inside. There was only one quick way to find out,
they decided, and one of the engineers volunteered to stand in a
steel sentry box fixed in the airstream at the base of one of the
chimney stacks. As the blowers were switched on, his task was
to watch and see what happened through a small reinforced-
glass window. For hours he waited in the hurricane of cold,
damp air as the fans gained momentum and then, after the test,
gradually slowed down. But he found the cause of the trouble.

Operation of the pile is normally controlled, of course, under
9

I3O ATOM HARVEST

far more reasonable conditions. The control room, insulated
from the thunder of the great fans, is lined with many dials and
devices that provide a continuous record of operating condi-
tions. Operation of the whole complex is conducted from a
single grey steel control desk in the centre, which contains all
the essential indicators and controls, including the master
shut-down switch that can in a moment of emergency release
the sixteen great safety rods so that they come crashing down
into the pile and prevent further reaction. Another switch
operates the twenty-four normal control rods that vary the
degree of activity within the pile and move in and out in
response to the slightest pressure of a finger. One of the most
important devices in the control room is the bank of lights that
indicate immediately the position of any fault that may develop
in any of the controls.

Uranium fuel rods, once they have been " cooked" for a
sufficiently long period in one of the piles, have to be extracted
again and transferred to the chemical plant. This provides
quite a problem of remote control. Each fuel element is a foot
or so long and they are all fed into the channels one after
another until it is full. When they have been in the pile for the
appropriate length of time the new slugs are fed in and these
push the irradiated slugs out at the far end of the channel,
where they fall into trucks, which are run through a shielded
tunnel under water to the "cooling pond".

Because of the intensely radioactive state they are in when
they first come out they are left in this pond, which is like a
large open-air swimming bath, for a period of up to three
months. This period enables the intense activity of substances
like radio iodine to die down and cause less contamination of
the chemical plant. Before the cooled cartridges can pass on, the
can must be removed, a task that is done under water by
remote control by a machine with 1 8-ft-long aluminium arms.

The first stage of separation, known as the "primary stage",
results in the production of four liquids of which the most im-
portant is that containing plutonium. There are only a few
pounds of this liquid for every ton of fuel elements, and it is
handled with the greatest care and economy. The second is a
large quantity of rather impure uranium solution, and the

A TASTE OF TROUBLE 131

third a large amount of dirty solvent that can be distilled and
used again. The fourth and most troublesome is composed of
a great deal of intensely radioactive fission products, all in
solution.

It goes without saying that the whole of the primary separa-
tion process has to be carried out by remote control from be-
hind concrete walls many feet thick, and this added enormously
to the difficulties of design and operation.

There appeared in the early days to be no possibility, either,
of reaching the plant to correct faults or to mend leaks or adjust
pumps once it had started to operate. The designers had to plan
it in such a way that it would last for scores of years without
needing to be maintained. Only one material could be relied
upon to meet such a remit and that was the finest stainless steel,
which would have to be welded throughout and then submitted
to the most searching X-ray examination. Every one of these
X-ray plates, more than 50,000 of them, was filed away for
future reference.

To avoid the need for maintenance it would have to be a
plant in which fluids could move from one point to another
without any pumps, filters or valves. There would just be
columns, tanks, and miles and miles of connecting pipes, all
stowed away in an enormous concrete box, but so designed that
process men would always know the nature and condition
of substances, rate of flow, and temperature, at any point
within the system.

[la]
Secret Deadline

THE prospective visitor to Britain's first plutonium factory will
not find the name " Windscale" in any railway time-table nor
yet in a gazetteer. The name came, it appears, right out of the
blue, just like the wind that often moans and whistles round the
great filter-rooms perched 415 feet up on top of its massive
chimneys.

Geographically speaking, Windscale is in the village of Sella-
field, and although there are few houses in evidence there is a
tiny railway station, no more than a halt really, that bears this
name a hundred yards or so from the factory's main gate.

The nearest place of any size is Seascale, famous for its golf-
course, five minutes' run in a train to the south, but this is
only a village with a population of a thousand or so, and many
shoppers go northwards to Whitehaven, or to Barrow-in-
Furness, further south.

The last few hours of the journey northwards from London
are a dreary business. The train stops at most stations on the
way, although several of them must have done very little busi-
ness since war-time factories closed down. On the left are great
stretches of flat sandbanks covered at high tide. To the right
pleasant rolling country with the hills of the Lake District,
when you can see them, further east.

The observant traveller will catch sight of the Windscale
chimneys, unique in the world for their shape, a minute or so
before the train arrives, and as he climbs the winding, dusty
road the two atomic reactors, each the size of a super cinema,
and the ten-storey chemical plant make an impressive sight.

132

SECRET DEADLINE 133

As you walk up the neatly laid-out approach to the factory
gates, guarded by armed police, you catch a glimpse of well-
kept gardens inside. On the miles-long security fence that
surrounds the plant are prominent but futile notices at short
intervals warning that photographing of the factory is forbidden,
as if the world of tiny but effective miniature cameras and tele-
photo lenses and the like had stopped still while the atomic
age went marching on.

They are a mixed lot, the men who travel up in the train to
work at Windscale each day and who had gradually filled the
carriage as it made its way up from Barrow. A few of them
talked and joked, but many of them sat quietly, talking to no-
one, as if they lived and worked in a world apart. There are
3,000 workers altogether on the payroll at Windscale, including
800 scientists and engineers. Two thousand of them, mainly
industrial, come from Cumberland.

The job of recruiting the industrial grades for the new work
fell to the factory's senior labour manager, Miss Mitchell, a
tranquil, friendly woman with stylishly waved grey hair and a
strong Scottish brogue. She would be, I would say, in her middle
fifties; she used horn-rimmed spectacles and wore a neat grey
costume. The men around the plant would say, I think, that
she " definitely has class 5 '.

She told me she used to be with Coopers, the provision
people, in Glasgow as welfare supervisor for a number of years,
but at the beginning of 1941 joined the Ministry of Supply and
went to an ordnance factory at Bishopton in Renfrewshire. It
was a large place, making all sorts of explosives and employing
about 23,000 people. She was labour officer, then labour
manager, and finally senior labour manager. After a period
when the Ministry of Supply was scaling down its factories and
depots, Miss Mitchell was asked to go to Windscale "on loan"
for a period of six months. It has developed already into seven
and a half years.

Glasgow-born, she went to Paisley Grammar School and
then to a commercial school called the Athenaeum. She speaks
a bit of Spanish, French and Italian. At first, she tells me, she
wanted to be a foreign correspondent in some company but
later changed her mind and went into personnel management.

134 ATOM HARVEST

"It was interesting coming here. It is a chance in a million for
a person in my line to get the job before anyone has passed
through the gates.

"The first year was spent in steadily interviewing people in
conjunction with the local labour exchange. While we hoped to
get all the semi-skilled and unskilled labour locally, we had
very little chance of finding skilled men. This meant going for
them to Barrow and Workington. The trouble here was that
the transport position was such that, even if people had wished
to study and take technical training, it would have been just
about impossible. We had to bring people in. We had a nucleus
of men from ordnance factories like Drigg, which by now was
on a care and maintenance basis.

"The story of Cumberland is a sad one", she told me. "There
were many mature men in the thirties to fifties who seemed to
be completely overwhelmed by the county's history of industrial
depression. In Glasgow I had been used to the more militant
types, people who had had almost as bad times as the people of
Cumberland but who had gone marching with red flags. Here
they had been submerged by the influence of bad times. They
were inclined to sink back and you had to jolt them out of it.
In the war they had the ordnance factories, of course, and actu-
ally war-time had not been at all bad. But they had in their
memories the pre-war days of slump and the fixed idea that
these days would come back again. Some had migrated to
America, only to be hit in time by the slump there too. They
had no faith.

"Every day a number of them were up for medical examina-
tion. Our first recruitment was for the graphite shop, and
graphite to them meant coal, and coal in turn meant pneumo-
coniosis and T.B. Unless they had been handled humanly it
would have been no good attempting to persuade them. Here
the humanity and tact shown by the doctors helped so much.
Word had got round that we were X-raying them and many
were afraid. Then some of them came back new people from
the surgery, after they had been X-rayed and shown to be in
good health. Men who had been many years in the mines and
thought they 'were bound to be dusted' and their lungs diseased
were new men when told there was nothing wrong with them.

SECRET DEADLINE 135

It worked like a most marvellous tonic. What did strike me
about all of them was the consistent honesty. We had to do
a lot of checking up and not once have I found that they were
bluffing."

As the factory expanded they had to bring in more men from
outside. Vickers Armstrongs were in a slack period and were
contacted. "'We are getting a lot of applications from your
men', I told them. 'Do you mind if we take them?' They were
confident that they would get all the people they needed when
the time came but they warned me that we were unwise in
taking too many men from Barrow. There is a saying 'Barrow
sticks to Barrow'. Shipyards, they thought, would get busy
again and the men would leave. That was only true to a very
limited degree.

"There were others who came from Tyneside, Teeside,
Merseyside, Portsmouth and Plymouth. Many of them were
fitters, born in Cumberland, who had migrated to other cities to
get work and who were quick to take advantage of the chance
of coming back to Cumberland again. They now have enormous
faith that they will be absolutely all right here. I would say that
at the beginning they did not realise the immensity of it all, not
until the first pile began working. It was not only people in the
works that had to be disabused about this. A very great deal was
done by the boss in talking to farmers, unions, rotary clubs,
chambers of trade and commerce and the like. The importance
of that work could not be overestimated."

The "boss" to whom Miss Mitchell referred was Henry
Gethin Davey, the forty-six-year-old Welsh works general
manager, who is a chemist, physicist, engineer, schoolmaster
and local politician, all rolled into one. Davey, a short, serious
man with a way of getting what he wants, has been in charge
since the Windscale project started. He was born near Cardiff
in 1908. At school he earned a scholarship to Cardiff Univer-
sity. After graduating with first-class honours in chemistry,
physics and mathematics he took a master's degree.

"My first job", he told me, "was really a teaching one in a
place called Treforest, Glamorgan. It was run by the South
Wales coal-owners and ultimately was taken over by the county
authority and became known as the Glamorgan College of

136 ATOM HARVEST

Technology. The war came, and being a chemical engineer I
was sent to explosives work. After a training period at Pembrey,
West Wales, I was transferred to Drigg, an ordnance factory in
Cumberland, built for the manufacture of T.N.T. I helped to
start it up."

By 1942 Davey was managing chemist there and two years
later was made deputy superintendent of a group of three
factories, Drigg, Sellafield and Bootle, under Hines, who now
manages the Atomic Energy Authority's Capenhurst factory.
When the war ended, Sellafield closed down, but Bootle and
Drigg continued to operate. Bootle was a " breaking-down"
factory which extracted the metal from unwanted ammunition.

In April 1947 when Hinton visited the area he asked Davey
to take charge of the Windscale factory. Although Davey by
then was a chemical engineer, the physics and mathematics of
his original degree now came in handy. "It meant that I had
a reasonable knowledge of atomic structure and radioactivity.
I had, like you, of course, been brought up on Rutherford's
conception of the atom and a great deal had happened in the
meantime. There was a great deal to be learned and much
studying to be done and I spent some weeks at Harwell."

Davey is married but has no children. " I used to play games, "
he told me, "but I scarcely ever do so now. My chief interests
outside the job are gardening and music. I am essentially a
listener. I am not one of those people who think that playing
the harpsichord is like stroking a parrot's cage with a toasting-
fork, and I like Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Bach, Purcell and
Byrd."

Davey reckons that the background of explosives work that
many of his men had was a great help. "We were very con-
scious of the need of things like operating manuals, emergency
instructions and house rules of conduct within the plant, and
these were drawn up before ever it went into operation. It was,
however, an attempt to adapt known techniques to unknown
problems, and time had proved that in some ways it was the
wrong approach.

"The original conception was of a works divided into groups.
The general group, in which there would be no radioactive
hazard and in which people would work in their own clothing;

SECRET DEADLINE 137

and a chemical and pile group, in which there would be hazard
and people would have to remove all their clothes and put on
special garments. After much thought we felt that this was
fundamentally wrong because it gave the conception of clothes
for the protection of the individual. From the beginning we
set out to make modifications to the plant that would confine
the radioactivity so that there would be less and less need for
special clothing. In my own opinion this is the right approach
and in fact it increases safety to a substantial degree.

"The idea at first was that radioactive material would get out-
side the plant anyhow and that protective clothing would be
needed to prevent the individual from becoming contaminated.
The new conception is that shielding should be made to perform
its proper function and therefore personnel will be free to use
their own things. The extent to which we succeeded can be
measured by the small amount of protective clothing that we
now wear."

He had a bit of a job at first putting the new idea over to his
men. "In this part of the world one tends naturally to draw
analogies from the collieries. One illustration that I used was
that of coalmines where gas is a substantial hazard. 'Men do
not wear masks day and night 5 , I would tell them. 'All neces-
sary steps are taken, instead, to ventilate the colliery. In emer-
gency, however, rescue teams wear full protective clothing and
carry canaries or rats in cages. 5 That was something that they
could understand.' 5

Nowadays at Windscale they have reached the stage where
most personnel entering the chemical group change only their
shoes and put on outer garments. The number of men making
a complete change has now dropped from 800 to 300 and the
tendency is expected to continue.

"Support for our methods 55 , Davey told me, "is provided by
the number of cases of contamination. Since Windscale started
up we have been involved only once in serious contamination.
In the early days there were a large number of minor cases.
Now, instead, cases of contamination are quite exceptional and
relatively light."

The "serious" case Davey had mentioned was of a craftsman
involved in a spill of radioactive material. He suffered more

138 ATOM HARVEST

from the scrubbing down, the doctors say, than he did from
the radioactivity. People soon learned that it was better to
avoid contamination than to suffer the remedies.

To get the men accustomed to the idea of radioactivity Davey
had a "mock-up" plant built. " It contained all the usual things
that a chemical plant needs, vessels, pumps, tanks, valves,
filters. Although this plant only manufactured ammonium
nitrate we pretended that the whole thing was radioactive and
process men were taught operations under simulated radio-
active conditions and were drilled in the precautions that were
necessary. Engineering personnel had to maintain the plant
and again we pretended that it was radioactive. The ammonium
nitrate ended up as fertiliser on the factory lawns."

Nuclear engineers don't talk about an atomic reactor "start-
ing to work". They say it has "become divergent" or "reached
criticality ". In each case, however, it means that there is enough
nuclear fuel within the pile when the safety plungers and control
rods are out to allow the chain reaction to work. There is, as the
pundits would say, "spare k".

This stage was reached in the case of the first of the Windscale
reactors on a cloudy July day in 1950, when, even if the reaction
did produce any vapour, which, of course, it did not, no-one
would have noticed it leave the tall chimney. At that time,
Davey tells me, there was nothing but grass and a few holes
here and there on the site where the ten-storey primary
separation plant would later be built to receive irradiated fuel
elements from the pile. It was a case of taking first things first.

There were, he explained, still eighteen months to run before
the first fuel elements would need to be removed prematurely
from the pile to meet the urgent need for plutonium. The
normal economic period would be much longer.

To meet the Government's original remit for purified
plutonium in August they were taken out of the reactor in
December 1951. Towards the middle of February, with only
six months to go, the slugs were still at the bottom of the "cool-
ing pond" losing some of their radioactivity. On February 17,
when Sir Winston Churchill told Parliament of plans to test a

SECRET DEADLINE 139

British atomic weapon at Monte Bello in the autumn, the huge
primary separation plant where the irradiated fuel elements
would be initially processed had still to be tested. Not even
"tracer runs", token quantities of radioactive material, had
been passed through the many vats and miles of piping. "Al-
though everything was still proceeding to schedule, we shud-
dered", Davey told me, "when we heard of the Prime Minister's
public announcement."

It was all very well to know that the secret programme re-
quired the delivery of material by a certain date. It was quite
a different matter to have the whole world know of that commit-
ment before they could be absolutely sure of the fact themselves.

"If ever a man earned a decoration," says Miss Mitchell, "it
was earned by Mr. Davey on the day he took the final decision
to let the contaminating fluids enter the plant."

Davey himself admits it was the biggest decision he had ever
had to make. "People kept on talking of modifications that
might have been done. Others were asking us if the plant was
safe and satisfactory. Finally came a day late in February when
we said that we had done everything that we could for safe and
satisfactory operation. 'We have tested the plant and shown it
to be liquid-tight, first by inactive operations and then by trace
runs', I told the staff, 'and now we are starting up'."

Davey admits that he did not sleep much that night. He
took his plant to bed with him, and all night through he could
see the individual vessels, and imagined the fluids passing
through the pipes. "In eight hours", he told me, "we had
reached the point of no return. The plant had become so radio-
active that no further modifications could be made. The first
part of the plant was too 'hot' to touch. If I had not taken that
decision when I did there were people who with the best in-
tentions would have kept us going with further modifications
for weeks."

Luckily, all went well. The plant worked precisely as it was
meant to do and Penney got his plutonium on the date specified.

Calculated Risk

WITH only a couple of months to go before the date already
announced for the first test, Sir William Penney's team had no
time to waste. Britain had had a fairly large team at Los
Alamos under Sir James Chadwick. There were Peierls, Fuchs
and Penney on the mathematics side, and Bretscher, Frisch,
Marshall, Moon, Poole, Rotblat, Titterton and Tuck and others
in the various physics departments. Some, like Frisch, who
after the war went to Cambridge, had actually performed ex-
periments in America that meant bringing together quantities of
materials that would have exploded under the right conditions.

One of the methods that Frisch used in Los Alamos, he told
me, was to take a lump of atomic explosive large enough to
form a bomb, but which had a cylindrical hole drilled through
the centre, place a boron counter close to this lump to measure
the "flux" of neutrons produced, and then, when all was ready,
he would drop through the hole a plug of fissile material just
sufficient to fill it.

The combined mass was slightly "over-critical". That is to
say, there would be more than enough fissile material present
between the two lumps to bring about a spontaneous atomic
explosion. Frisch, who has a predilection for telling jokes or
recalling what are really quite sensational stories with a com-
pletely deadpan look on his face, explained to me that "it was
quite all right" because the flux of neutrons would take several
thousandths of a second to build up enough for an explosion,
whereas it was calculated that the plug, as it passed through
the hole, would only be in the most favourable position for one

140

CAl^CULATED RISK 14!

thousandth of a second. In the short instant that it was there
the neutrons multiplied very rapidly, but before they could do
any harm the plug had gone through and everything died down
again.

Frisch and his co-workers for this experiment were behind a
thick concrete wall and he reckons that they were well shielded.
There was one occasion on which he admits there was some
danger. "I was doing an assembly 95 , he told me, "to discover
the critical size in the absence of a neutron reflector. I had
overlooked the fact that the body itself is a reflector of neu-
trons." One of the counters was clicking rather irregularly, and
an assistant, who thought it had gone wrong, pulled it out to
change it. "Leave it where it is," shouted Frisch, leaning for-
ward, "I'm just going critical." As he spoke he saw through the
corner of his eye that the flickering neon lights that recorded
units, tens and hundreds of neutrons passing into the counter
had ceased to flicker. There were so many neutrons about that
the counter could no longer distinguish them and the light
remained on continuously.

It turned out that the flux had multiplied many thousands of
times purely because Frisch had leaned forward. Had he al-
lowed this process to proceed two seconds longer he would have
been killed, as two others were in similar experiments. Instead, he
quickly removed one block of uranium and stopped the reaction.

Frisch adopts a casual attitude about it all. "In these small
reactors (the name they give to such assembliesT of fissile material)
you know exactly what they will do. You can go as near to an
explosion as you like with safety. There is no danger at all so
long as the experiment is controlled. In many cases", he ex-
plained, "the system had been so adjusted that the flux of
neutrons took over fifteen seconds to build up from nothing to
a dangerous level, and then shut off in complete safety".

"An atomic bomb", he summed up, "is a very dangerous
beast that is always under control so long as you do not make
any mistakes, so much so that after a time it is difficult to
realise that if you make a mistake you have had it."

Like Frisch, most of the British team had been engaged on
obtaining fundamental data about the bomb process. They

142 ATOM HARVEST

were not engineers or technicians. None of them had had direct
responsibility for the really practical problems of making the
bomb, the engineering, the metallurgy, handling of plutonium
or actual weapons assembly; and by 1952 most them had left
the project to join universities in purely academic work. At
the Weapons Research Establishment itself at Fort Halstead
near Sevenoaks, Kent, and at the Woolwich Arsenal, neither
Penney not any of the other members of his staff had ever
handled a sizeable lump of plutonium.

Sir William will tell you that the credit for the fact that the
British bomb went off on the specified date goes to the whole
of the team, but the team point back to Penney. The man who
had shouldered this great responsibility was a thirty-year-old
assistant professor of mathematics at the Imperial College of
Science when war broke out. With his boyish face, blue eyes,
tousled, sandy hair and ingenuous smile he looks the last person
in the world to develop a fearful weapon of destruction. He fell
into his present job quite accidentally and without any of his
own contriving.

Penney had been working at the college on very fundamental
and abstruse problems concerning the nature of matter, and,
like most other scientists when war broke out, his name was on
a central register of scientists that had been prepared for the
purposes of national emergency.

"I was naturally willing to do anything that I could, 55 he
told me, "but I Md no idea of what that could be. Then, one
day, after several months of hearing nothing, I met Sir Geoffrey
Taylor, a world authority on fluid mechanics, and he told me
he was being asked by Government departments lots of ques-
tions about explosions and that sort of thing. He could not deal
with all the questions and therefore asked me to have a go at
the pressure wave caused by an explosion under water. "

Sir William (he was Dr. Penney then) got down to the prob-
lem at Imperial College and within a few months had gained
what he called a "reasonable understanding 55 of what happened.
He did not do it by firing torpedoes at old hulks or anything
dramatic like that. Penney's tools were pencil and paper. His
method was to take phenomena like sound waves that were
already well understood in the laboratory, and use pages and

CALCULATED RISK 143

pages of formulae to extend this knowledge to the problems
under study.

His way worked and his theoretical predictions fitted so well
the measurements that the Admiralty made with actual ex-
plosions that Sir Geoffrey Taylor, who at that time was studying
what happened inside an explosive when it went off, asked
Penney if he would try and find out more about what happened
in the air outside. First he dealt with very fundamental stuff,
and then he began to consider what blast waves did to various
structures, ships, houses, windows and the like. Just when he was
beginning to get a firm grasp of the matters, another urgent job
came along. Plans were starting on the Normandy landings and
the Admiralty wanted advice on what the wave patterns inside
the Mulberry harbour were going to be and what stresses the
various structures would have to withstand. Penney's findings,
a classic piece of research, are now preserved in the annals of
the Royal Society.

While British and American troops were preparing for the
Normandy invasion, a most distinguished collection of scientists
were studying at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, the question of
how to make an atomic bomb. Very little was known at that
time about how it was to be designed and assembled. They
thought that a crude device could be made by firing one bit of
fissile material into another, in a totally enclosed system rather
like a gun-barrel, but there were better ways than that and
they depended on the compressibility of fluids and shock waves
and all the other things that Penney had handled so easily in
Britain.

The Americans knew of Penney's work and invited him to
Los Alamos in June 1944, a few days after D-Day. At the be-
ginning he worked as one of the team of mathematicians and
physicists that already included many from Britain. As matters
became clearer concerning the bomb, it was decided that a
test would have to be made. Before this could be planned and
the instruments positioned and scaled, the scientists had to have
some idea of what the explosion was likely to do. Not many of
the workers at Los Alamos had ever seen an explosion at all,
never mind an atomic one, and Penney soon became a general
consultant.

144 ATOM HARVEST

The first explosion of an atomic weapon took place in the
deserts of New Mexico at a place called Alamagordo on
July 1 6, 1945. It was so successful in fact that many of the
instruments failed to stand up to the unprecedented pressures.
Published accounts tell of how some were crushed and others
were torn loose and thrown considerable distances. There was
one sort of instrument, however, that thrived on this sort of
treatment. It was devised by Penney.

To quote from one official American record:

"He made the daring guess that the humble tin-can can
prove to be one of the best 'instruments' for measuring the
terrific pressures produced by atomic bomb explosions. He
soon showed his guess to be correct. He demonstrated that
whenever a gasoline can was partially crushed by a sudden
pressure wave the degree of the crushing depended on the
exact intensity of the pressure wave. For example, an over-
pressure of only a few pounds per square inch might reduce the
can's volume to 80 per cent of the original volume, but a more
extreme over-pressure might reduce its volume to 10 per cent.
Cans are cheap, hundreds may be used and the average effect
may be measured with accuracy. (The decrease in the can's
volume could be measured simply by filling the can with water
and weighing it and making a comparison with the weight of
the uncrushed ones.) Many other instruments were equally
ingenious."

Preparations for the atomic attack on Japan were already
well advanced. Teams of scientists were leaving Los Alamos
for the Mariana Islands. Penney was sent as a member of one
of these teams. Another, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire,
V.C., was sent as British Service observer.

The devastation caused by the atomic bombs in Japan is now
a matter of history. Manhattan District immediately sent
parties of doctors and scientists into Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to survey damage. Penney's talent came to the fore again.

"We did not know at that time", he told me, "how big the
explosions were or what sort of blast accompanied them. There
were theoretical estimates, but even in the case of the Nagasaki
bomb, which had been tested beforehand at Alamagordo,
these only gave large limits."

CALCULATED RISK 145

While other members of the party were busy asking questions
and taking elaborate photographs Penney went about matters
in his own, very personal, way. " There were squashed petrol
cans there too," he told me, "and flagpoles bent over by the
wind, panels that had given way under load, bits of concrete
and bent tubing. I thought I could tell later what sort of
loading had caused the damage and brought them back to
England with me."

Penney normally looks a bit like a mischievous schoolboy
who is enjoying a secret joke, but the twinkle in his eye turns
to a broad grin that spreads right across his face as he re-
members the day when he finally arrived back in Britain by
Clipper. The 450 excess that he had to pay on his "collection"
immediately made him a focus of interested attention among
the Customs Officers at the airport, who, in 1945, knew little
about atom bombs and nothing of Dr. Penney.

"A Customs man asked me what I had to declare and the
chap just would not believe me when I told him the bags were
full of old pipes and concrete and things", said Penney, with a
chuckle. "He asked me to open them up and had a good look
at the whole collection before finally deciding that I really
must be crazy."

Dr. Penney went back to his old room in Imperial College
and carried out his tests, obtaining the results he had antici-
pated. All the time he was thinking how pleasant it would be
to become a professor again. The Ministry of Supply were not
so keen to lose him, however, and after putting a good deal of
pressure on him, directly and indirectly, they offered him the
job of Chief Superintendent of Armaments Research. From
being a junior professor he had suddenly sprung, overnight
almost, into the head of a great mass of research and develop-
ment establishments scattered over the length and breadth of
the country.

Success did not go to his head. People who work with Penney
find two words to describe him. "He is naturally democratic",
one of his closest colleagues told me. "He does not attitudinise,
either by conscious informality or heavy dignity. Meetings are
conducted round a table and attention paid to what is said
rather than to personalities. Sir William or anybody else may
10

146 ATOM HARVEST

go to the blackboard to illustrate an argument or to draw a
diagram, but certainly not with any idea of achieving dramatic
emphasis.

"In a scientific establishment," he went on, "it is an ad-
vantage when the man in charge concentrates entirely on the
subject under discussion, is explicit, economical and objective
in his views, and invites comment in a matter-of-fact manner
whether the subject is of a highly technical or general nature.
Explicitness is a difficult thing to achieve, especially in highly
technical matters that are frequently of a mathematical nature.
It needs a remarkable mind to break through all the complica-
tions and to be able to define the fundamental difficulties or
the broad conclusions that can be reached and that will de-
termine whether a good deal of detailed work is worth doing
or not."

Penney's ability to bring out the main lines of argument are
very strikingly shown in mathematical analyses of physical
problems, but atomic bombs involve many other sorts of prob-
lem as well, chemical, metallurgical and engineering, to name
only a few, and Penney shows the same clarity of explanation
in discussing all of them.

In the early days after his appointment he was to have little
chance to visit his new domain, however, for no sooner had he
said "all right" than the Americans decided to stage the first
great Bikini tests, one of them intended to determine the effect
of an air burst on ships and ground establishments and the
second an underwater burst to discover the effect on a fleet at
anchor. The Americans gave him the title of Co-ordinator of
Blast Measurement and asked him to take charge of a large
group known as the "Pressure Group (Cans and Drums)".

The name, perhaps, gives the wrong impression. There were
many other gauges too, but all of the same crude sort. One
type resembled a line of organ pipes or a harp and consisted of
many tubes of graded width and length. The idea was that
when the pressure wave hit the pipes the long, thin ones would
bend most and the short, fat ones the least.

The Bikini test had been organised on a fantastic scale. There
were 42,000 men taking part, 242 ships, 156 aircraft, 750
cameras, 5,000 pressure gauges, 25,000 radiation recorders,

CALCULATED RISK 147

204 goats, 200 pigs and 5,000 rats. The first of the bombs,
dropped by a 629 with the finest bombsights, was intended to
burst several thousand feet above the target fleet.

Blast waves are sound waves, and it is just as important to
put a sensitive blast-recorder at the right place as it is to stand
the right distance from a microphone when talking into it. For
reasons that have never come to light the bomb landed, instead,
several thousand feet from the point that had been selected.
Some of the more complicated blast-recorders that had been
carefully positioned beforehand were too near to the burst and
the scales were quite inadequate to record such violence,
whilst others were too far away and showed nothing. The
"Cans and Drums' 5 brigade not only proved the accuracy of
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blast deductions; they gave
invaluable data on the new explosions.

One of the things that worried everyone who saw or studied
the second Bikini test, where the bomb was exploded under
water, was a phenomenon known as "base surge".

"The explosion threw an enormous quantity of water up
into the air", Sir William explained. "The water broke into
fine drops, so that after the explosion there was an enormous
cylinder of water drops in the air with a cloud at the top. The
average density of the air and water in the cylinder was higher
than that of the air outside so that it quickly fell down again
under the action of gravity. Then it went rushing outwards
across the surface of the sea like a foggy, contaminating gas.
Its movement was for all the world like a thin pancake mixture
spreading as it is poured into a frying-pan."

The base surge was of great practical importance, because
the column of collapsing fluid was thought to contain most of
the deadly fission products after the explosion. When Penney
got back to England, he set his men to work immediately on a
series of experiments to try and determine at as little cost as
possible how much water would be lifted into the air by such
an explosion, and how it would behave.

In Britain, an island power depending on its sea-routes and
ports, we badly needed to know the full extent of the danger.
The way in which the answer was found demonstrated once
again Penney's genius for improvisation and his way of seeing

148 ATOM HARVEST

a problem in its simplest terms. "We made a glass tank",* he
told me, "and filled it with water. Inside the tank we put an
open vertical waxed paper cylinder the inside of which was
filled with coloured water laden with salt to make its density
greater than that of the water. The cylinder was then pulled
up and the column of coloured water at once began to spread
over the bottom of the tank just as the column of wet mist
or spray spread from the explosion over the Bikini Lagoon."

By varying the conditions of the experiment it was possible to
match in the model the rate of spread of the Bikini base surge
as published by the United States and thus discover the weight
of water thrown up as mist at Bikini to be about 150,000 tons.
Much later Britain was able to add to this information by
full-scale tests.

The First Fruits

BRITAIN'S first atomic weapon exploded in the Monte Bello
Islands on October 3, 1952. It was not until three weeks later,
on October 23, that the world learned from Sir Winston
Churchill that a i45O-ton frigate, H.M.S. Plym, had been
vaporised by the blast.

"When the planning began," Sir William Penney tells us, "a
lot of thought was given to deciding which type of explosion
would provide information and experience of the greatest value.
Purely scientific measurements are most easily made when the
weapon is placed at the top of a high tower, but there were
other weighty considerations. The civil defence authorities in
this country badly needed more data about atomic explosions
and accordingly the test was planned to get as much novel
information as possible for civil defence. The decision was thus
taken to explode the weapon in a ship moored near land,
thus simulating an explosion in a port."

The Ministry of Supply at once sought the help of the Deputy
Chief of Naval Staff, Vice-Admiral E. N. Evans-Lombe. A
committee was formed among the Ministries concerned and in
May of the following year Rear-Admiral A. D. Torlesse was
chosen to take command of the operation.

The ship, he was told, would not only have to carry the bomb.
It would also have to function as an automatic transmitting
station that would relay to a safe spot outside the range of the
explosion a vast number of measurements from instruments
distributed all over the ship until the moment when they, too,
were vaporised by the atomic explosion.

150 ATOM HARVEST

A ship could undoubtedly be found among the vast number
left over from the war. A bigger problem was where to hold the
test. Out came the Admiralty charts. What was wanted, if the
test were to be of real value, was a piece of water that resembled
the estuary approach to a typical British port. It was no good
choosing another Bikini or Eniwetok. They would have been
of little use in solving a very English problem. In any case,
many of the results of the Bikini test were already known. It
was no good, either, choosing a place that would involve ex-
pensive and unpopular transfers of population or where winds
might afterwards drive the poisoned clouds over inhabited
areas.

Navy men who knew the western coast of Australia reckoned
that a group of islands known as the Monte Bellos would take
a lot of beating. They lie about ninety miles north of the tiny
town of Onslow and there are about a hundred of them, sur-
rounded by shallow and sometimes rocky waters. The largest
of them are Hermite, Trimouille, North West and the Alpha
Islands. On the west they are bounded by a coral reef. No-one
lived in or anywhere near them and the only animals on the
islands seemed to be rats, brought there probably by some ship
that had been wrecked on the coast.

The Australian Government were consulted. They sent
H.M.A.S. Karangi to make a preliminary survey of the area.
When the survey proved the islands to be entirely suitable for
the test, the Australians, ever ready to co-operate to the full,
generously gave permission for the trials to be held there, sent
H.M.A.S. Warrego to make a detailed survey of the treacherous
waters, and offered substantial help in preparing the site and
supplying food, water and everything else that was needed.

By August 1951 ships of the Royal Navy that were to take
part had been chosen, refits planned, and even the dates of
departure from Britain and arrival in the test area had been
settled. They were adhered to almost exactly.

The ships chosen were the aircraft-carrier Campania (base
ship and flagship of Rear- Admiral Torlesse), the " weapon
ship" Plym, and three tank-landing craft. Refit in the Cam-
pania's case meant doubling the wardroom and cabin space to
house scientists who eventually outnumbered naval officers by

THE FIRST FRUITS 15!

four to one; the provision of specially fitted workshops, large
stores, extra boats, extra plant for distilling water, and stores
for the civil engineering works, the huts, towers, shelters, and
the like that would be needed on shore. There were aircraft,
too, three helicopters and two amphibians.

The tank-landing craft had plenty to carry as well on their
long journey across the world. To start off with there were 800
men of the Royal Engineers and all their stores, building
material and plant, besides quantities of technical stores for the
scientists. They carried seventeen smaller landing craft with
Royal Marine crews who had learned their job on the
Normandy beachheads.

The secret had been well kept. The first news of the test came
on February 1 7 of the following year when the Prime Minister,
in a seventy-two word announcement, told of the test and
assured the country that there would be no danger whatsoever
from radioactivity to the health of people or animals. The
Prime Minister's announcement had still given no details of the
plans, however, and when, two days later, the first two ships of
the squadron, the landing ships %eebrugge and Narvik, sailed out
of Portsmouth under Captain G. C. Colville, few knew of their
connection with the operation. They arrived on April 26 and,
helped by the Australians, work started at once on the task of
preparing the site for the test.

To many the testing of any sort of bomb, even an atomic
bomb, must seem a relatively simple affair, a little more compli-
cated maybe than the annual expedition into the home garden on
the night of the Fifth of November to set off the family fire-
works, but certainly not a major operation costing millions of
pounds. To scientists who still had only an insignificant quan-
tity of nuclear explosive to show for the scores of millions of
pounds that had been spent in Britain on the bomb's develop-
ment, the position was very different. Nothing must be missed.
Every scrap of scientific information that could be extracted
from the test would be carefully recorded and analysed in
relation to the rest of the data.

Electronic gadgets, Sir William Penney tells us, were the
basis of nearly all the measurements and there were more than
300 of them, many grouped together in half-dozens and dozens.

152 ATOM HARVEST

Some of them looked like television sets, but instead of a viewer
watching a picture on a screen a camera was used to photo-
graph the record. Many of the readings made by the instru-
ments were radioed automatically to a control recording office
in one of the ships.

Cameras of all sorts surrounded the Plym, many of them very
straightforward affairs, some to take still-pictures, others to
provide a cinematograph record. When an ordinary bomb of
T.N.T. bursts, the temperature produced is around 5,000
degrees Centigrade. In the case of an atomic bomb it is nearer
a million. The pressure is of the order of hundreds of thousands
of times greater than that of the atmosphere we breathe. When
you think that a pressure of one single atmosphere more than
normal will blow down a house like a pack of cards, you get
some idea of the effect achieved by an atomic bomb when it
bursts in the belly of an unarmoured frigate. It would not take
long, certainly less than one-thousandth of a second. In one-
tenth of that time the incandescent ball of gas would already
be 100 feet in diameter.

It was those early moments that the scientists were most
anxious to capture. The average cine camera takes 300 times
as long to get a single photograph, so that would not do. Nor
would more specialised apparatus already designed by scien-
tists for split-second work. The atom men had to set to work and
design their own.

But young scientists in Britain have always been encouraged
to make shift for themselves when novel apparatus is required,
and the ability to devise the right gadget and then produce it
has become a traditional part of the research worker's training.
The museums of the Cavendish Laboratory, of the Clarendon
and of the Royal Institution and so many others are full of such
ingenious devices. The answer that the scientists of Sir William
Penney's team produced for their new problem was worthy of
earlier tradition. It was a camera which was capable of taking
nearly 100 separate high-quality photographs in one ten-
thousandth part of one second. The exposure time of each
photograph was one ten-millionth of one second.

Such a camera is required to get pictures of the early stages
of the explosion of an atomic bomb on a tower. The Monte

8 and 9. The detonation oi a small spoonlul ot conventional ni(?n explosive in a
laboratory water tank under properly controlled conditions enabled Sir William
Penney and his team to anticipate accurately the effects of exploding an atomic
weapon in the hull of the frigate PLYM near the Monte Bello Islands. Above: the
laboratory experiment. Below: the full-scale explosion.

14. Cloud produced by the first British atomic explosion in the Monte Bello
Islands in Autumn, 1952.

15. The second British atomic explosion witnessed by
the author one year later in the Central Australian
Desert produced a much smaller cloud, chiefly because
of the lack of local moisture.

THE FIRST FRUITS 153

Bello explosion, however, did not need such rapid photography
because the ship covered up the very early stages. The camera
was therefore run at one-tenth of its maximum speed.

Men of the Royal Engineers and the Ministry of Supply had
the job of installing all these devices. There were concrete em-
placements and shelters to be built, jetties, power stations,
stores and accommodation, mainly tented, for the men who
would have to spend nearly a year on the site. The majority of
the engineers themselves, to their credit, continued to live in
the landing craft in the most spartan accommodation that had
been intended to be occupied for a few hours only by invasion
troops during the journey from their main base to their ob-
jective. With them too were a small nucleus of men from the
R.A.F., doctors, scientists and those responsible for ferrying
equipment between Britain and the Monte Bello site.

When the frigate Plym> already bearing the means of its own
swift end, arrived off the Monte Bellos on August 8, 1952,
escorted by the aircraft carrier Campania and the landing craft
Tracker, warships of the Royal Australian Navy were already
patrolling a great stretch of ocean. The same day the whole
area was declared a danger to shipping. On shore security men
were busy checking newcomers to the tiny port of Onslow, pro-
tecting activities at the naval dockyard of Fremantle, further
to the south, and keeping a close eye on all aircraft movements
to make sure that a ban on flying over the area was not broken.

While all these preparations had been going on, meteoro-
logical experts, including two Australians from Melbourne,
were busy sorting through past records of the area to assist them
in their task of predicting a suitable day for the test. Weather
was one of the big worries. An engineer and a scientist between
them can legislate for most things, but they still cannot control
the winds. Weather, in fact, provided the planners with some
of their most anxious moments. One of the worst of these came
right on the eve of the test.

In order to have winds in the right direction at that time of
the year, winds, that is, that would blow the fission products,
contaminated salt spray and explosion debris far to the north,
where they would scatter and lose their potency long before
they struck human habitation, the planners had to choose a

154 ATOM HARVEST

period of strong winds both on D-Day and D i, the day before
the test.

They were strong all right. So strong, in fact, that even the
navy men began to wonder whether the scientists would be
able to go round to the various islands beforehand to set their
many instruments. It was touch and go, but the sailors and the
marines between them managed it and by nightfall the scien-
tists, soaked to the skin, were able nevertheless to report to base
that all their many devices were ready.

There was still one more worry. Would the weather hold?
Would the winds, now southerly, remain long enough to blow
the deadly products northwards out of harm's way, or would
the test after all have to be put off? They need not have worried.

The weather-men were dead right, as time showed, and the
following morning, after the area had been completely evacu-
ated by all but the firing party, the time clock was started.

Penney was on the deck of Campania with Admiral Torlesse
and most of the ship's company. They faced away from the
Plym as the last few seconds were counted out over the loud-
speakers. Then there was a great flash that reached the far
horizon. Even Dr. Penney, who had witnessed the first historic
atomic cataclysm in the desert at Alamagordo and later seen
a bomb burst over Japan, described the scene as "terrifying"
as he turned round to find the frigate Plym had vanished and to
see a great greyish-black cloud shooting up thousands of feet
into the air and ever growing in size. Over the islands a great
dust-storm suddenly sprang up.

It took the noise of the explosion a minute to reach the party
on Campania. They were ready for the first bang. The second,
which came several seconds later, took them completely by
surprise, and then came the peculiar sensation in their ears of
making a sudden descent in a lift. They were feeling the suction
wave that follows a great blast. And fourteen miles away the
great black cloud moved steadily upwards to form after ten
minutes the shape of a great letter " Z " as strong winds, blowing
in quite different directions at different heights, pulled the
column of smoke into a great twisted spiral.

The bomb had worked. The hundreds of instruments dis-
tributed around the different islands had worked. The records

THE FIRST FRUITS 155

had flowed steadily into the radio rooms of the Campania. A
later analysis showed that the record was complete and would
provide invaluable data to those who were planning to protect
food supplies in war and the lives and health of the men and
women working in the many ports and harbours that form a
vital part of the nation's lifeline.

The double bang immediately prompted many to suggest
that a hydrogen bomb had been used to blast the Plym. The
real explanation, as Dr. Penney later confirmed in his broadcast
to the world on November 7, 1952, was a much simpler ex-
planation. The first bang had reached them by the straight
and quicker path. The second was provided by a shock wave
that had travelled upwards and been bent down again by a
layer of warmer air some two miles up.

[15]
The Project Grows

NEITHER the scientists at Harwell nor the engineers at Risley
had been content to confine their thoughts to simple, air-
cooled reactors suitable exclusively for the production of
nuclear explosive. No sooner had each of the establishments
made adequate dispositions for the GLEEP and BEPO piles at
Harwell and the two production reactors at Windscale than
they formed small groups to discuss other possibilities for the
future.

At an early stage in the North when they were really hard
put to find engineers to deal with more immediate jobs on their
hands, Kendall, then in charge of the Windscale piles, had still
argued that "if we are so desperately short of designers that we
cannot afford to maintain a mixed squad of ten people to work
on more advanced ideas, we might as well chuck in our hand".

Permission was given for them to go ahead and they went
down to Harwell to talk the matter over with Dr. Dunworth,
head of the Reactor Physics Division, and Compton Rennie
and others who were already engaged on similar studies. "We
have nothing that we actually have to do," they told the
Harwell men, "but we want to keep thinking."

The American war-time project had already demonstrated
that many different types of reactor were possible and suggested
a number of profitable new lines of exploration but it did not
disclose details. Britain's resources were a good deal more
limited, however, and it was important to choose carefully the
types of reactor on which to concentrate the available effort.
The selection depended clearly on what each reactor was re-

156

THE PROJECT GROWS 157

quired to achieve and on the fuels and structural materials
likely to be available.

The first reactor ever built, Fermi's pile in Chicago, had one
purpose only, that of proving that such a thing could work at
all. More since then have been built to manufacture explosives,
to test structural materials, to manufacture ray-emitting radio-
isotopes needed for medicine, research or industry, to generate
electricity, to propel submarines and to facilitate the designing
of atomic bombs. Others are being designed at present in
various parts of the world to do the same jobs in a different,
more efficient way. At least two are being designed to drive
aeroplanes, others for rockets, and a number to propel such
large ships as aircraft-carriers and ocean-going liners.

The design requirements in each of these cases are very
different. In one, lightness would be essential; in another it
would be of no importance at all; in another vast amounts of
heat would need to be extracted, while in some types so little
heat is produced that no special arrangements need be made
for removing it.

GLEEP, the first British pile to be completed, was strictly
a research and materials-testing reactor. If the suitability of a
particular metal for use in a later pile were in doubt or its
purity were in question, it was only necessary to place a speci-
men inside GLEEP to find out immediately its effect on the
chain reaction. Impurities in some cases of only one part in a
million were easily detectable.

Piles of this sort, based on natural uranium, inevitably
needed very large cores to cut down the effect of neutron escape
to the exterior. GLEEP, for example, had a core in the shape
of an octagonal prism 17 ft long and nearly 19 ft in diameter.
The total quantity of graphite used was 505 tons. The blocks
were stacked in forty layers, each layer being arranged like a
parquet floor. The whole assembly was based on a fundamental
distance of 7 J inches between rods of fuel that were carried in
diamond-shaped channels in the graphite.

Because of the shortage of uranium metal at the time when
the pile was built, metal itself was only used in the centre while
uranium dioxide was used in the outer portion. The metal was
in rods or " slugs" a foot long and 0*9 inch in diameter. These

158 ATOM HARVEST

were sprayed with a thick coating of aluminium to prevent
corrosion and escape of fission products that might otherwise
be ejected from the bars by the force of the fission process.

The uranium dioxide was pressed into pellets wrapped in
paper containers and packed in aluminium tubes. The pile
contained altogether twelve tons of uranium metal and twenty-
one tons of uranium dioxide.

In the Canadian reactors, of course, the slowing down of
neutrons was achieved even more effectively by the use of heavy
water. The water had to be " heavy", it will be recalled, be-
cause hydrogen atoms of ordinary water, although ideal in size
for the slowing-down process, have the defect that they absorb
neutrons at slow speeds before they have a chance of reaching
other atoms of uranium 235. The exception to this is when
enriched fuel is used.

In one of the latest American reactors, that intended to power
the submarine, Sea Wolf, a compromise has been struck between
hydrogen, of atomic weight i-o, and graphite of weight 12,
by using the lightweight metal beryllium (9-013 units). This
metal is in many ways better suited to the task than graphite,
and engineers would have used it before, both as a moderator
and also as a protective sheath for fuel elements. They were
prevented from doing so in the early days by the difficulty of
obtaining sufficient quantities, by lack of data about its prop-
erties, and because of doubts about using a substance known to
be extremely poisonous.

In the other American atomic submarine, the Nautilus,
ordinary water was used as a moderator. The fuel was enriched
in uranium 235 content to make up for losses of neutrons in the
water. Piles using ordinary water either as a moderator or as a
coolant are very attractive from many points of view but arc,
as has been seen, inherently dangerous, in that if for any reason
the supply of water fails, or is turned to steam, a source of
neutron wastage has been removed and the reactor might heat
up. It might become " super-critical" and destroy itself,
releasing fission products over a wide area.

During the early years of the British project the shortage of
weapons-grade or enriched fuel meant that much of the design
work had to be concentrated on bulky slow neutron reactors

THE PROJECT GROWS 159

and at a very early stage initial studies were completed of a
reactor of this sort for submarine propulsion. The project was
shelved when it was found that a reactor based on natural
uranium, the only fuel available, would be far too large for the
sort of submarine that the Navy had in mind. While it would
probably have done for an aircraft-carrier, there was not at the
time considered to be sufficient call for an atom-powered
carrier to justify the effort needed.

The whole design position changed the moment it was de-
cided to extend the gaseous diffusion factory for the enrichment
of uranium already under construction at Capenhurst. This
factory was at first intended only to rejuvenate uranium already
once used in reactors and to provide small quantities for use in
research.

With the promise of enriched fuel ultimately being avail-
able, it was possible to contemplate a completely new range of
reactors, smaller in size, lighter in weight, and using construc-
tion materials like steel, and coolants like ordinary water under
pressure or molten metals like sodium or potassium. This
represented an enormous step forward.

The size of the reactor core could in extreme cases be reduced
from something the size of GLEEP or BEPO to that of a football
or a four-gallon petrol tin, if very pure fuel were used, or of
from six to twelve feet across if the fuel employed were only
partially enriched.

The new technical possibilities were obvious to all, but
atomic energy planning was still dogged to a certain extent by
the conviction that power generated in this fashion would be
far more expensive than that generated by conventional
methods. However, a few at Harwell saw the future in a different
light and among them was R. V. Moore, a young engineer in the
group that had taken over BEPO from the Risley organisation.

Moore, I am told, is a typical example of the young uni-
versity-trained engineer in the atomic energy set-up, one of
those whom Owen had described as coming up "the easy way".

A pleasing young man in his middle thirties, with wavy
brown hair, he speaks with a friendly cultured accent, looking
often at his fingernails but never biting them. Like most of the
atomic energy set, he is firmly addicted to the blackboard habit.

l6o ATOM HARVEST

He uses it as his diary, and reminders, in blue and white chalk,
to take home frozen peas to his wife mingle with power curves
and a list of letters he has to write.

Moore served an engineering apprenticeship in the electrical
supply industry and at the same time studied for his degree at
London University, attending the firm in the morning and
going to lectures at the Battersea Polytechnic and King's College
in the afternoons. He graduated just before war broke out and
was with the Navy until he joined Harwell in 1946.

After the completion of BEPO he worked with others on the
submarine-propulsion study for a bit, but in his spare time he
gave a lot of thought to the economics of nuclear power. At
that time the outlook was not particularly bright. "It is diffi-
cult to give you now the feeling of the time", he told me. "A
lot of people had the idea then that it would only be of military
significance for tasks like the propulsion of submarines and the
like."

Moore wrote a paper in which he considered the question in
the light of information then becoming available from the
operation of the Windscale production piles. It suggested that
power stations could be built to produce energy at prices com-
parable with those of conventional generating plants and
caused quite a stir at the time among the few people in the
secret. A big conference was called soon afterwards to discuss
progress that had been made to date. All the important people
were there. British Electricity Authority engineers were invited
for the first time. There were many university people who had
been acting as consultants on various aspects of the programme,
and some, too, from industry.

The meeting was a sort of symposium. There were other
papers read, too, which looked into the possibility of what sort
of reactors could be built, but it was Moore's paper that caused
real excitement. It was decided that Harwell men should pro-
ceed at once to design studies for such a power station, which
Moore had called PIPPA.

Mr. B. L. Goodlet, another engineer, and Moore, with the
co-operation of many of their Harwell colleagues, spent two
years on their basic studies and by February 1952 completed
their drawings and estimates of cost, performance and time scale.

THE PROJECT GROWS l6l

Completion of this work, as it happened, coincided with a
request from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the production of
more plutonium, and Sir Christopher Hinton, after discussing
the matter with Sir John Cockcroft, asked to see Moore.

"I went up to Risley with all my papers," he tells me, "and
Hinton and Owen spent two days going over them together in
the greatest detail. At the end of the second day they made their
decision to build two of them." Moore moved to Risley as
deputy to Cunningham, and when Cunningham became
seriously ill, took effective charge of a project which was
destined to provide the world with its first large-scale atomic
power station, the one at Calder Hall.

"There was nothing really scientifically new about the
PIPPA piles at Calder Hall as far as the British project was
concerned, but many engineering problems had to be solved be-
fore a definite design could be evolved. The fuel elements of the
Windscale production piles had been fin-shaped, instead of simple
rods, to make cooling easier and cheaper, but the cooling air was
passed up a high chimney to dissipate the heat into the atmos-
phere to save the extra time that would have been needed to pro-
vide a more efficient but necessarily more complicated system."

In the PIPPA piles the cooling gas, carbon dioxide under
pressure instead of air, is recirculated through the pile after
passing through boilers or "heat-exchangers" where steam is
raised to drive the dynamos that provide electricity.

The scheme employed is extremely simple in principle. In
each pile the fuel rods are arranged vertically in a honeycomb
of graphite blocks built up within a vertical steel cylinder known
as the "pressure vessel".

The cooling gases leave from four exits around the side of the
dome-shaped top and are conducted to four "heat-exchangers"
which are really vertical boilers. Inside are many dozens of
water pipes around which the hot gases circulate on their way
down. The water thus cools the gas and gets boiling hot in the
process. The more efficient the design of the vessel, the more
effective will be this exchange of heat. The gases can then be
pumped back into the pressure vessel while steam produced is
used to propel turbines of precisely the same sort as are used in
a conventional coal-burning power station.

l62 ATOM HARVEST

Nuclear power stations of this sort have been referred to by
Harwell scientists as "Model T" ones, recalling the simple but
very reliable early Ford motors. Their "thermal efficiency",
that is to say, the proportion of the heat that they can turn into
usable electric power is expected to be only 20 per cent, as
opposed to the 30 or more per cent realised by a modern con-
ventional station. The figure could be at least 25 per cent
were it not for the fact that the need to produce plutonium is
still of paramount importance to national defence, and sacri-
fices have been made in thermal efficiency to produce the
maximum yield of this nuclear explosive.

The Calder Hall station is, of course, an experimental one
and much may be learned from its operation. Although the
PIPPA piles are the first of any size in the world to be used
to generate power, they may still be considered to be of fairly
conventional design because they embody theories and tech-
niques that have all been individually well proved.

Of far more interest both to scientists and engineers is the
advanced type of reactor now under construction at Dounreay
near Thurso on the north-east coast of Scotland. This, to start
off with, is a "fast" reactor, which means that the neutrons are
not slowed down by any moderator. To make this possible it
will use fissile material, plutonium or uranium 233 or uranium
235, of a high degree of purity. The size of the core is, as a
natural consequence, very much reduced in size and will in
fact be a cylinder two feet in diameter and two feet deep.

The problem of removing the heat from such a small core
is tremendous. Sir Christopher Hinton has stated that from
every square centimetre of surface, the area of an average
fingernail, the amount of heat to be continually extracted is
equivalent to that produced by a single-bar domestic fire. To
do that liquid metal must be used, and this must be cooled in
turn by heat-exchangers outside the pile.

Potentially the most interesting part about the pile is that it
is designed in such a way that surplus neutrons produced by
the chain reaction will be absorbed by a blanket of "fertile"
material to produce new atoms of primary fuel. In early ex-
periments the fuel used in the core will be uranium 235 and the
fertile material in the outer blanket will be uranium 238. This

THE PROJECT GROWS 163

is purely because more is known about these materials than is
known of others like plutonium and thorium. It is most unlikely,
however, that the filling will be the same in later and more
advanced models.

The fact that "breeding" is feasible has already been proved
to be so by experiment, first in the United States and then with
the aid of a fast neutron research reactor of zero energy, known
as ZEPHYR, at Harwell. Not many months after both
American and British scientists had announced with some
pride that this breeding process had produced one new atom
for every atom of fuel consumed, the United Kingdom Atomic
Energy Authority was able further to announce to the Geneva
International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic
Energy in August, 1955, that on a purely experimental basis
they had been able to double the amount of fuel produced and
generate two new fuel atoms for every atom burned up.

The design of the Dounreay reactor core represents a com-
promise between the views of physicists, who, ideally, would
like to keep the investment of fissile material as low as they can
by using the smallest possible core, and those of the engineer,
who, while equally keen to economise in fissile material, must
find room for structural materials and coolant and needs a
more dilute core.

Even in such a small core the amount of fissile material used
is very great, for a cubic foot of uranium weighs well over
1,000 Ib and would suffice for many atomic weapons. The
concentration of the energy source within such small dimen-
sions inevitably brings with it a new hazard. All is well so long
as the liquid-metal coolant flows according to plan and is in
its turn cooled by the heat-exchangers. If the cooling system
should fail, however, there is the possibility that the heat within
the reactor core will rise to such an extent, in spite of various
safety and emergency shut-down measures, that the fuel slugs
will become badly damaged, if not vaporised.

To take care of this possibility a great gas-tight sphere of
two-inch-thick welded steel plate, nearly as big in diameter as
the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, is to be erected around the
reactor. There is little doubt that this extra safety measure
will take care of any contingency and prevent the scattering of

An advanced type of atomic reactor at Dounreay which is designed to produce
more nuclear fuel than it consumes, while at the same time providing substantial
quantities of heat energy for the generation of electricity. As an additional safety
measure it is enclosed in a great sphere of steel made of plates one inch thick,

Arrangement of the Dounreay Fast Reactor Shield.

A. To secondary beat exchangers

B. Primary heat exchangers

C. Steel sphere

D. Airtight door

E. Electro-magnetic pump

F. Reactor core

G. Breeder blanket

H. Thermal shield
I. Inner shield
J. Biological shield
K. Ground level
L. Coolant pipes
M, Hoist

THE PROJECT GROWS 165

radioactive materials over the surrounding countryside if
anything went wrong.

Dounreay is one of eleven nuclear reactors completed or under
construction within the United Kingdom Atomic Energy
Authority establishments. A further six PIPPA reactors are on
order for the Authority, and at the time of writing sixteen
reactors are planned by the Central Electricity Authority for
their short term industrial power programme.

This represents a formidable achievement in a period of ten
economically-difficult years. The importance of the reactor
programme (listed below) lies not so much in the numbers as
in the diversity of ideas employed and the basis they provide
for further advances.

REACTORS COMPLETED OR NEARING COMPLETION
ON JANUARY i, 1956

GLEEP (Graphite Low Energy Experimental Pile). Natural
uranium metal. The first atomic pile in Britain. (August

I947-)

BEPO (British Experimental Pile O). A research pile of moder-
ate energy (6,000 kW), graphite-moderated natural
uranium, air-cooled, heats buildings. Prolific source of
radio-isotopes. (July 1948.)

WINDSCALE. Two full-scale plutonium-producing reactors,
air-cooled. Built for military purposes. Output never
disclosed. Completed 1950.

DIMPLE (Deuterium-moderated Pile Low Energy). First of
the British heavy water piles built as pilot to further,
larger neavy water reactor.

ZEPHYR (Zero Energy Fast Reactor). Built to investigate
materials and general problem of breeder and fast reactors
and to pave the way for Dounreay reactor.

Two PIPPAS at Calder Hall, Cumberland. Britain's " Model
T" industrial piles providing steam for a power station,
the first full-scale industrial plant in the world, with turbo-
alternators for electricity generation comparable in size
with those of conventional coal-burning generating
stations.

1 66

ATOM HARVEST

DIDO (443) at Harwell. A full-scale high-flux heavy water
research reactor and for isotope production. Completion
date 1956. 10,000 kW.

A sectional view of the heavy water reactor Dido at the Atomic Energy
Research Establishment, Harwell. Jobs which took a year to do in earlier
British reactors can be performed by Dido in a fortnight.

i. Reactor aluminium tank containing heavy water
a. Level of heavy water

3. Fuel element

4. Experimental hole

5. Graphite reflector

6. Experimental holes

7- Water-cooled thermal shield

8. Experimental hole entering heavy water

9. Experimental hole entering graphite

10. Vertical experimental hole

11. Thermal column of graphite to provide

beam of thermal neutrons

12. One of six control arms

13. Concrete biological shield

DOUNREAY. A fast neutron reactor using no moderator and
designed to breed more fuel than it consumes while at the
same time providing sizeable amounts of heat energy in

THE PROJECT GROWS 167

the form of steam for power generation. Provisional rating,
15,000 kW of delivered electricity. Completion due in 1958.

ZEUS (Zero Energy Uranium System). A full-size pilot model
of the Dounreay fast reactor but operating at zero energy.
Built at Harwell to gain information on fast reactor
problems.

PLUTO (REyys) at Harwell. A full-scale high-flux heavy
water research reactor intended for testing out complete
units and assemblies under high flux conditions. Com-
pletion due 1957. A duplicate of Pluto is being built at
Dounreay.

In the days when the plutonium factory was planned it was
assumed that the atomic reactors and the primary separation
plant, which is the most active area, would be run until there
was a serious breakdown and then they would have to be
discarded and others built.

One of the biggest achievements of the Windscale team, in
Davey's opinion, was the way they demonstrated that this need
not be true. The discovery was due in great measure to a young
London University chemistry graduate, Mr. Tom Hughes, who
runs the primary separation plant. After some initial operating
experience he inevitably saw means of modifying and improv-
ing parts of the plant if only this were possible. Ultimately he
expressed the conviction that if the plant were washed out
repeatedly so that solid matter like sludge could be removed, it
would be possible to enter and stay for a short time under
carefully controlled conditions.

Hughes talked the matter over with Mr. Donald Fair,
manager of the Health Physics and Safety Department, and
together they worked out details of what later became regu-
larly known as a "planned entry". They then put their idea to
the test. It worked as they had forecast, and overnight changed
the whole economics of atomic factory planning. Subsequent
work showed that most of the chemical plant could be entered
for short periods if the right rules were observed.

Davey could not tell how many planned entries had been
made. They have become now a matter of routine. No man

l68 ATOM HARVEST

goes in without holding a personal clearance that states what
work has to be done, the precautions that have to be taken, the
special clothing that has to be worn, and the time that he is
permitted to stay on the job. This certificate is filed at the end
of the job. No-one can instruct him to stay longer than the
time stated. It is a very specific document and even a senior
engineer would not go inside without one, nor would any man
dream of telling another that he could stay five minutes longer
than the document stated.

As part of this work, even cutting of plant, which is all stain-
less steel, and re-welding has been done. They have, for ex-
ample, drilled a hole in the top of a plutonium evaporator and
examined it, and then, when they were satisfied, sealed it up
again. Thrje years ago it was considered quite impossible to
do work in a plutonium plant.

The clothing first used for such work was of thick rubber and
very much like a frogman's suit. Nowadays, instead, they wear
what looks like an inflated polythene bag with a great "tail"
through which air is pumped. Made of transparent, paper-
thick plastic, it is so light that the body does not feel enclosed.
A man is much more comfortable, and by totally enclosing him
there is the guarantee that he cannot breathe even an in-
finitesimal amount of plutonium. The material is tough and has
stood up well to many tests.

Just how much the planned-entry system has meant to the
atomic energy industry may be judged from the fact that a
chemical process plant to serve the nuclear power station on
the nearby site at Calder Hall would, in Davey's estimation,
have cost y million or more. As a result of modifications to
the primary separation plant at Windscale over the past two
years the " through-put" has been considerably increased so
that it can deal with all the fuel elements from Calder Hall.
Further modifications now planned may enable Windscale to
cope in addition with irradiated fuel from many of the reactors
to be built under the 300 million nuclear power scheme.

t'6]

Capenhurst an Engineer's
Dream

ONE of the most secret and rapidly expanding establishments
in the British atomic energy project, outside the laboratories
and factories where weapons are designed and made, is the
great factory at Capenhurst in Cheshire, where uranium 235 is
separated from the heavier and less useful uranium 238 by the
process of "gaseous diffusion".

Long after everyone interested in atomic energy knew what
this establishment was intended for, officials still refused to
confirm the fact. Even now they adopt a subtle change of tone
when they discuss the factory, as if they are afraid of being
overheard.

Harwell has been described a little inadequately as a paradise
for physicists, and Springfields and Windscule, with equipment
unrivalled anywhere in the country, represent the ultimate in
chemical engineering. Long before I was ever allowed to visit
the Capenhurst factory, I heard top men in the atomic energy
project describe it as the "mechanical engineer's dream".
With its diversity of finely finished mechanical pumps and com-
pressors and remote controls that have to operate for a year or
so continuously without overhaul, it is certainly something
that the mechanical engineers may be proud of, but the story
does not end there. There are ample problems for physicists
and chemists, too.

Capenhurst is situated on the long peninsula between the
rivers Mersey and Dee known as the Wirral. To the north and

169

I7O ATOM HARVEST

south of it along Merseyside are a long succession of oil refin-
eries, detergent factories, shipyards at places like Birkenhead,
Port Sunlight and Ellesmere Port. Further north and to the
west are the seaside resorts of Wallasey, New Brighton, Sea-
combe and Hoylake. Some say the area is damp and bad for
the chest, but others are just as prepared to swear by its health-
giving properties. To the visitor it is like a piece of well-culti-
vated delta country with a long succession of factory chimneys
along the northern skyline.

The factory has two main purposes and its two plants cover
an area four times the size of Paddington Station. The first is
for the rejuvenation of the depleted uranium that has been used
as fuel in the production piles at Sellafield. As fuel only slightly
enriched in uranium 235 is required for the production piles,
this plant is comparatively small. The second plant carries on
the enrichment process until it is nearly 100 per cent when the
separation of the two isotopes is nearly complete.

There are two calls for this extra-pure uranium 238. The
main one is the supply of weapons-grade explosive and the
second is the production of fuel for fast reactors of the Dounreay
type. The process used is the same in each case. It depends on
the fact that if you have a mixture of two gases in contact with
a porous membrane, the lighter gas will leak or diffuse through
the pores of the membrane more easily than the heavier one.
In an ideal system of this sort the speeds at which the two gases
pass through the barrier will be directly related to their weights
by a simple mathematical formula. Many other factors in-
fluence the efficiency of the process, however. The pressure on
each side of the membrane will obviously have great effect, and
so will temperature.

In the case of uranium separation there are several additional
difficulties to be faced. There is for a start the fact that it only
forms one suitable gaseous compound under reasonable oper-
ating conditions of temperature and pressure. This is known as
hexafluoride, or "hex", and is formed by the combination of
one atom of uranium with six of a highly toxic, incendiary and
corrosive gas known as fluorine. Metals and other substances
normally considered to be stable and unreactive, react violently
in the presence of fluorine. Normally fireproof substances like

GAPENHURST AN ENGINEER'S DREAM 171

asbestos burn fiercely when they come into contact with it,
others react with it to form compounds that explode spon-
taneously.

The general principles of the separation process have been
known since the early years of the nineteenth century when the
physical laws governing the passage of gases through a porous
barrier were first described. The explanation of the pheno-
menon is simple. It is that at any given temperature the
molecules of a lighter gas move faster on an average than those
of the heavier gas. From this it follows that molecules of the
lighter one will pass through pores more quickly than those of
the heavier. The method was used for the first time to obtain
a partial separation of two isotopes of the element neon in 1913
by the British physicist Aston.

Another problem in the case of uranium is that the difference
in weight is only 3 parts in 238 for uranium itself, and in the
case of the hexafluoride gas is only 3 parts in 352, or less than
one per cent. It means that even in theory each filtration will
only enrich the mixture by 4 parts in 1,000. In practice this
theoretical separation factor is never reached.

Ten-fold enrichment at this rate could only be obtained by
filtering the gas 1,800 times in succession, while the nearly
100 per cent enrichment required for weapons purposes calls
for about 4,000 successive stages.

An added complication was the fact that "hex" is a solid
under normal conditions of temperature and pressure, and as
pressure is used to force it through the membrane the tendency
to solidify is further increased.

For this reason gaseous diffusion factories are bound to be
large. The one at Capenhurst is about half a mile long and
composed of 400 or more heat-proof "cells" each containing
a number of units. Cells of this sort contain many compressors
and pumps to keep gases circulating. The whole cell must be
kept at tropical heat. No man can work for long in such a
temperature. The compressors and pumps require such a large
amount of electricity that the factory calls for the complete
output of a large modern central power station.

The man responsible for designing and ordering the equip-
ment of this great enterprise was Mr. Harold Disney, a shy man

172 ATOM HARVEST

in a lead-grey suit, who told me, with obvious sincerity, "I
find it more difficult to talk about my work than I did to do it".

Disney is one of the many men in the Atomic Energy Autho-
rity who have come up the hard way and in doing so have
gained a rich and broad experience. He went to school in
Ilkeston, near Nottingham, and was articled as an apprentice
to Messrs. G. R. Turner Ltd. at Langley Mill. He went to
evening classes at Nottingham University College and, after
qualifying, joined the Alkali Division of I.C.I. During the war,
he told me, he went over to the Royal Ordnance Factories, and
when the atomic energy business started up, Sir Christopher
Hinton asked him to join it. "The main problem for me", he
went on, "was that we faced the building of a huge factory with
a short target date and after limited development work. To
this was added the difficulty of recruiting staff. No-one could
have had any experience because the job had never been done
before in this country.

" We had to produce a flow-sheet from scientific data, bearing
in mind that the gases we were dealing with were highly cor-
rosive. We had to try and foresee what sort of engineering
problems would arise and evolve techniques to deal with them.
In an entirely different job there was the problem of teaching
the meaning of cleanliness in our particular context. There
was, too, the big problem of getting uniform quality of material.
The super priority was always the necessity of keeping every-
thing so clean that nothing could happen subsequently to block
up the pores, of which there are several million to every square
inch of membrane separating the various cells."

Cleanliness was something which I was to hear a great deal
more about later on when I visited the factory. Ralph Lyon,
the labour manager, told me it was something which many of
the men found it difficult to understand and some found irk-
some. There was, for example, the sealer and red-leader who
had come from a neighbouring shipyard. "He came to us on a
Monday", Lyon told me, "and gave in his papers on Wednes-
day because he found the job too clean and too quiet. That was
an extreme case, but some effort is often necessary before a
man from an everyday job or even from a chemical works can
acclimatise himself to the standards required at Capenhurst,"

CAPENHURST AN ENGINEER'S DREAM 173

Even the engineers had to get used to completely new
standards. To most engineers a casting is clean by the time it
has been machined and polished. Before it can be used in a
gaseous diffusion plant, however, it must go through a whole
series of special cleaning processes.

The difficulties of the diffusion process are increased by the
fact that it must be partly conducted in a state of vacuum that
was previously approached only on a small scale in the electric
bulb industry. If there is any leakage of air or moisture into
the system the effect may be disastrous.

Designing the factory and building it was a big-enough
problem, but it was only the first of many. The next was that
of getting it to work. Many names were associated with that
achievement, but two of them became almost a legend. The
first was that of the general manager, Mr. S. F. Hines. The
other was that of Mr. Robert Alexander, the works engineer.

Hines, a forty-eight-year-old Londoner, who went to St.
Albans school and the Imperial College of Science, is by train-
ing a chemist, but his main interests right from the start were
in industrial management. He graduated during the slump
period of the early thirties and took a research job but did not
like it. Soon afterwards he applied for an appointment at the
Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey, near London,
and was soon running an experimental plant making T.N.T.
by a new method. By the end of the war he was superintendent
of a group of three ordnance factories up in the North.

When the atomic energy business started, Hines became
general manager of the factory at Springfields, where they were
processing crude uranium ore and turning it into finished fuel
elements. In 1950, when work started at Capenhurst, he was
asked to take charge.

The speed at which work was pushed on soon provided Hines
with plenty of problems. " Because designs of plant compressors,
pumps and the like were being modified more frequently than
would normally be the case," Hines told me, "assembly com-
mitments were transferred to our own workshops. It was a good
thing in many ways because it gave us experience in techniques
which would be encountered in plant maintenance. This gave
my engineers more insight in matters of design, but to do this

174 ATOM HARVEST

we had to build up quite a sizeable engineering team. There
was also, of course, all the scheduled maintenance to be done
all the time and 'crash' work when anything went wrong."

Hines reckons that his present task is the most interesting job
he has ever come across. He has constantly to call upon the
services of specialists in many different fields, chemists, physi-
cists and engineers. Capenhurst probably employs a higher
percentage of physicists than normally obtains in industry, and
like the rest the majority of them come straight from school.
There are relatively few who have had experience and all the
time Hines has to concentrate on building the staff up. "In the
main", he told me, "we recruit people in junior grades and
these are people we look to to fill vacancies in more senior
positions. I pay a great deal of attention to the question of
training youngsters, and do a lot of it myself. I regard it as one
of my most important jobs."

Teamwork, he believes, counts as much as anything else, and
he pays a lot of attention to industrial morale. "If the manage-
ment is working as a team it gives the labour force an example.
A sense of unity is one of the first things that one must try to
achieve. We do the same thing for the industrial labour force.
We constantly try to get them to realise that we regard them as
responsible individuals. In this part of England the industrial
grades normally have the fixed idea that management is going
to exploit them. That attitude takes a lot of breaking down.
You must be continually at pains to show them that there is no
question of exploitation."

To illustrate his point about the need for esprit de corps and
teamwork in the factory Hines told me of a typical case where
all had pulled together to meet an emergency. "There was a
particular heavy maintenance commitment", he told me in his
typical unemotional factory jargon. "It required all possible
effort to be concentrated on the job. The work had to be com-
pleted without interruption of the process going on within the
plant. My maintenance men", he told me proudly, "without
exception carried on right to the end."

The Second Bang

AN ATOM bomb explosion, even when seen from a safe distance,
is something not easily forgotten. I'd hate to see one from near
at hand. The one that I was privileged to witness was the test-
ing of Britain's first operational weapon. It took place on a
remote claypan in the Central Australian "desert" shortly after
dawn in November 1953. Even in the Southern Hemisphere,
where the seasons are reversed, it was unmistakably cold, in
spite of the extra clothing that we had all been warned to wear.

There was an eerie atmosphere about it all In spite of the
fact that the world by then was used to atomic bombs and
about forty had been exploded in one part of the world or
another, we still had, all of us, a strong feeling of awe. We felt
that we were part of a great conspiracy to brave nature. Even
James Cameron, the veteran foreign correspondent of the News
Chronicle, who had seen two tests before, shared our feeling of
being in a world ringside seat on a great occasion.

The events of the past few days had contributed strongly
towards it. The sense of the unusual had mounted steadily
since the moment when the group of newspaper correspondents
had reported to the Australian Government Office in Melbourne
from places as far apart as Sydney, London, Singapore and
Korea. The Australian authorities confessed that they were
worried about us. They knew that some of us were personal
friends of scientists taking part in the test and their orders had
been to ensure that there was no contact between us beforehand.
Half of the security officers of Australia, it seemed, had been
detached to guard the bomb itself, secure enough as it was in

176 ATOM HARVEST

its desert fastness; the other half, disguised thinly at first as
guides, catering officials and "government historians", had
been told to watch the press corps.

We were billeted in what were intended soon to be the
women's quarters of a military aerodrome then being estab-
lished in the old ammunition factory at Salisbury, sixteen miles
from Adelaide. There was barbed wire all around the camp and
there were sentries at the gates. Every morning during the
days that we waited for weather to favour the explosion we were
called together at breakfast- time by our " guides" and asked
what we wanted to do that day. By remarkable and carefully
arranged coincidence that surprised us at first there was always
a police car about to go in the very same direction, and since
none of us could afford too often to call in a cab from Adelaide
we were usually very glad to accept the offer of a lift, even when
it entailed an escort.

For our guides, who were the kindest and friendliest lot of
security men I ever hope to meet, it was a problem of persuad-
ing us to stay in groups as far as possible and not to go in a
dozen different directions. It meant fewer men to keep an eye
on us and gave a few of them the chance to take time off. The
task of suggesting activities that would appeal to us got steadily
more difficult. We visited the local distilleries, the wine fields,
the fruit canneries and the local beauty spots. One enterprising
group even allowed themselves to be sent fishing for the day in
the bay to the great contentment of Bill Worth, the ex-R.A.A.F.
security chief, who felt at last that he had some of us well out
of harm's way. Wherever we went, of course, the Australians
showed us the warmth of their hospitality and we soon came to
know and appreciate the many fine wines and liquors that are
made in that area.

Every night, however, we had a stern reminder of what we
had really come for. We had to be in our isolated wire-enclosed
billet by 6 p.m. At that time each night we would learn what
the chances were of a test the following day and once we had
that information we were not allowed out again that night.
Such delays were hard on the entertainment funds of the
Commonwealth Security Organisation and each morning one
of their cars took back to Adelaide a melancholy load of empty

THE SECOND BANG 177

bottles. We soon began to feel that any further delays might
prove disastrous for the national economy.

We were waiting, of course, for the right sort of wind. It was
not just a matter of direction. The velocity counted, too, and
there were many different wind-levels to be considered. The
famous "Z" cloud in the Monte Bello Isles after the test the
year before had shown vividly how directions could vary be-
tween different points of the compass at different heights. It
was no good having a wind at ground-level that would blow
the cloud away from spectators if the effect were reversed at
10,000 ft.

The bomb was to be exploded at an undisclosed point some
hundreds of miles north-west of Adelaide and north of the
transcontinental railway that circles the Great Australian
Bight. It would have been ideal, of course, to have had a steady
wind drive the explosion debris slowly north-westwards along
the deserted Empire rocket range that stretches 1,500 miles
from Woomera to the western coast. Nobody expected the
winds to be as helpful as that.

When the site was first chosen little was known about the
meteorology of the Australian continent apart from the thin
belt of inhabited coastline. This made things difficult, for
weather is essentially something that needs to be studied on a
statistical basis over a long period, and examination of the
records of a year or so will very rarely give a true picture of
what is to be expected. Planners decided to collect all the in-
formation they could and meteorology immediately assumed
an important priority among other scientific preparations for
the test.

Weather-men were, in fact, among the first to be flown in to
the lonely desert site, later to be known as Emu Field. A
weather and forecasting station was set up and round-the-clock
observations were made by radio-sonde balloons that wirelessed
to earth automatically the conditions that they met on their
way upwards into the stratosphere. Similar data was collected
from all existing Australian stations and radioed to Emu to be
filed and analysed at frequent intervals each day. The exact
geographical location was ascertained of all known settlements,
native camps, missions and other inhabited areas.

178 ATOM HARVEST

Choice of the Emu Field site dated back to a time in 1950
when a reconnaissance expedition from the Long Range
Weapons Establishment at Woomera went out exploring the
desert for its own purposes. They found typical red plain
country covered in red bush, blue bush, spinifex, mulga and
sheoak. There were large expanses of sand dune and drift but the
terrain was quite often hard enough to permit landings by
heavy aircraft. Heavily scarred with claypans, it looked from
the air like the cratered surface of some dead planet. No abori-
gines lived anywhere near it and it was far too barren to attract
white men.

The need for such a land test area had been realised for a
long time. The Monte Bello Island site was ideal for the pur-
poses of the test held in October 1952. It gave the experts just
the information they needed about an explosion in one of our
shallow British harbours. That was not the sort of experiment
that needed repeating, however, and for the general purpose
of weapons improvement a wide expanse of flat terrain well out
of harm's way was much more the sort of thing that was
required.

Sir William Penney visited the site during the Monte Bello
test period. With him went two scientists, a radiologist, a
meteorologist and a signals officer. Penney said the site was
just what he was looking for. It was in the middle of an 80,000
square mile prohibited zone set aside for testing war materials.
In December the British Government officially asked the
Australian Government if they might use the site and received
an immediate assent.

To prepare the site for the test was no simple task. It is sur-
rounded by hundreds of miles of " gibber" plain, flat country
littered with small and large flat stones that make most un-
pleasant going for motor vehicles. It was also waterless. Major-
General J. E. S. Stevens, formerly Secretary of the Australian
Department of Supply and then chairman of the Australian
Atomic Energy Commission, took over the task and appointed
short, tough and wiry Brigadier Lucas to command the party
of 150 R.A.A.F. airfield-construction men, army engineers and
civilian specialists who were to start preparing the site. The
fact that a second atomic test was to take place was still only

THE SECOND BANG 179

known to a very few people in Australia. Most of the officials
in Melbourne were unaware of the purpose of their work and
men on the site imagined that they were working on some job
connected with the guided weapons range.

For the men in this early task force it was a seven-day-week
job like many they had tackled on active service. Every vehicle
of the convoys that set out from Woomcra had to be equipped
with water, stores, petrol and camping facilities sufficient to
last twice the time normally needed for their trip across the
trackless desert. With the early convoys went bulldozers and
other earth-moving equipment needed to prepare the landing-
strip and the many miles of high-speed motor-roads required
in the test area. But 80 per cent of all the equipment needed,
jeeps, refrigerators, boring plant for artesian wells, food, nissen
hut frames, water-piping, cement, heavy timber and other
equipment, was carried by Bristol freighters and four-engined
Yorks belonging to the R.A.A.F. and R.A.F., formed under
Australian command into what was known as No. 34 (Com-
munications) Squadron. They made six or seven flights a day
and were serviced round the clock.

To narrow the security risk and minimise the terrific supply
problems every man chosen had to be expert in two or more
jobs and they worked a seventy-hour week. One of the British
scientists said of them: "They are simply terrific and their
enthusiasm quite superb.'* One day when they were working
under the most primitive conditions Brigadier Lucas called
them together. "Men," he told them, "I have no good news
for you. You will continue working ten hours a day, seven days
a week. Water will be short. There will be no leave for anybody.
I will try to get amenities for you, but I can only promise a life
of hard toil." His remarks were greeted with a cheer and day by
day a chart in his office recorded the progress they were making.

Wells were drilled for water, but it came up brackish and a
distillation plant had to be set up. That meant less water, and
there was no beer to make up for it. The ration was "one bottle
per man per week". But the work went on and the men slept at
night under six blankets to reduce the demands on fuel. The
only recreation was the collecting of dingo scalps, for which there
was a premium in the form of a State reward.

l8o ATOM HARVEST

One of the strangest tasks carried out in those early days was
the collecting of "guinea-pig" equipment for the test. Many
items of equipment used by the modern army were to be
assembled in the target zone around the tower on which the
weapon would explode. The idea was to enable scientists to
study the effect of the explosion on battle equipment, ammuni-
tion of all kinds, radio and radar equipment, service uniforms,
vehicles and prefabricated huts. Much of this equipment did
not need to be placed in position until shortly before the test.

There was one item on which there could be no delay,
however. This was the request by the British Ministry of Supply
that six obsolete fighter aircraft should be dispersed over the
area.

When the Australian Government started looking round for
planes to meet this requirement the best thing they could find
were some war-time Mustang aircraft, which were quickly
rescued from a dump of unserviceable aircraft. Experts reckoned
they could be made " flight- worthy" if the job were done
without delay but warned that the planes were deteriorating so
rapidly that it might be impossible to get them into the air at
all at a later stage. Puzzled ground-staff were set to work on the
aircraft to make them serviceable enough for this last flight.

Equally mystified were the officers, a group captain, two
wing-commanders and a squadron-leader of the R.A.A.F.,
who were told off to fly them to a secret destination from the
airfield at Tocumwal on the New South Wales side of the
Murray River. Because of the absence of landmarks on the arid
desert they had to find their way by dead-reckoning, that is
by plotting their course on the basis of known speed and direc-
tion with the aid of a compass. They were told the job was so
secret that they must not use their radios in case by doing so
they gave any indication of the direction in which they were
flying.

Obeying their orders, they landed their planes at the Emu
Field site and returned to Adelaide by the next transport plane
without discussing their unusual mission. It is unlikely that they
would have learned much if they had done so, because at that
early stage the construction force still did not know what they
were building the base for.

THE SECOND BANG l8l

No doubt in the early days when the site was chosen the
administrative officials had in mind the hope that the work
would be of permanent use, but the difficulties arising from
the remoteness of the site and lack of water soon made it clear
that the first series of tests there in October 1953 would also be
the last. There were to be two atomic explosions and ten other
minor ones involving conventional explosive about which we
were told nothing. It was fair to assume that these minor ex-
plosions were aimed at testing various forms of detonating
mechanism. These devices rely on lens-shaped discs of con-
ventional high explosive faced with fissile material. Their
geometry is important because it determines the path this thin
coating of fissile material will take when the explosive goes
off. The idea is very similar to the cone-shaped "hollow
charges" used during World War II as anti-tank weapons.
These cones were lined with steel. The effect of the explosive
was to concentrate this hard lining into a thin pencil of molten
metal that could drive its way through armour.

The same principle was used in bombs to concentrate the
fissile material, but tests invariably resulted in the dispersion of
quantities of highly poisonous plutonium or uranium. It was
not the sort of thing that could be carried out at Aldermaston
in Berkshire, at the Woolwich Arsenal site south of the Thames,
or on islands off the east coast of Essex, where so many test
explosions take place. It had to be done somewhere remote and
unlived in.

Newspaper men had only been invited to one test, the first
of the two big atomic explosions, and there is nothing quite like
a job which means travelling 24,000 miles to see and report
something that is going to be over and finished with in about
one second. All through my mission, from the moment when I
set out from London on my five-day journey in a commercial
airliner that was already a day behind schedule, and read in a
normally reliable newspaper that the test was to happen in
three days' time, I had an awful feeling that something might
happen to render the whole journey vain. A missed plane or
mechanical delay, a sudden illness, the failure to be on the spot
at the crucial moment, to all this had to be added the problem
of uncertainty of getting the story back to London in time. In

l82 ATOM HARVEST

our messages from the site itself we were, by agreement,
rationed to 200 words, about eight sentences, that had to be
handed in within half an hour of the explosion. We were then to
fly several times over and around the spot where the bomb had
gone off before returning to Salisbury in our Bristol freighter.
Once on the ground at Salisbury again we would have to make
a mad dash by car through congested roads to Adelaide,
fifteen miles away, to deliver the remainder of the story to the
cable office in the middle of the city.

We did not know, of course, how much we were going to be
told by the authorities and how much we would have to guess
for ourselves. In preparation for the test I had visited a shop in
the Strand and bought myself a military oil compass and a tiny
and easy-to-operate device known as a clinometer that is used
by artillerymen to calculate the angle of elevation to nearby
obstructions. The compass I knew would tell me the direction of
the wind. The clinometer would tell me the height of the cloud.

The calculation was simple. It depended on the well-known
method for telling how far away lightning or a flash of gunfire is
by timing the interval before the sound arrives. With the distance
of the explosion known, it would be easy with the aid of a slide-
rule to calculate from all this data the height of the cloud.
Even a layman should then be able to judge whether it was a
"very big bomb " or a "very small one" or something way in
between. To assist me further I had drawn myself a bookful
of geometric graphs that would enable me to read this answer
straight off and that took account of the specially high speed
of sound during the early stage of the shock wave.

As things turned out I could have saved myself this trouble,
for the experts unexpectedly came to our rescue with a great
deal of information about the test. The weapon we were going
to see exploded, we were told, would be one with a relatively
small content of fissile material. That in itself would tend to
make the column of smoke a relatively low one. A second factor
that always determines the height of the cloud is the amount of
water vapour in the air around the explosion. When there is
plenty of it about, as in the case of many of the earlier atomic
explosions, a great deal of this vapour is carried up with the
rising fireball.

THE SECOND BANG 183

As the cloud rises, cold air is mixed in and the cloud expands
due to falling pressure. Soon the temperature falls sufficiently
to make the water vapour condense out into droplets, giving
the atomic cloud the appearance of an ordinary one. Water
vapour in the act of condensation releases, however, a great
deal of heat, and this in turn warms the cloud and gives it an
extra push upwards so that it may rise very high and often
reaches into the stratosphere, 40,000 feet or more up.

At Emu, we were told, there would be very little water
vapour at all in the air around the site. That meant two things.
First of all the cloud would not go very high, possibly only
10,000 feet or so. Secondly, the cloud would not be nearly so
well defined as many of those to which we had been accus-
tomed. The type of cloud effect we would see would, in the
absence of water vapour, be mainly characterised by the grey
particles formed from condensation of material that had formed
the tower, and by upswept dust particles from the ground. Its
form would be further picked out by the presence of nitrogen
peroxide, a reddish-brown gas formed by the combination at
great temperature and in the presence of nitrogen and oxygen
in the air itself.

Events the following day were to confirm this prophecy of
the experts. But before the test we had a long journey through
the night ahead of us. First to an aerodrome in police cars, but
not to the one we had normally used. To prevent the secret of
the test from leaking out beforehand and in case anyone were
watching at the nearby airport, which planes habitually
used, extravagant measures had been taken. We found our-
selves being hustled out to a military aerodrome some miles
away that none of us had visited before. Our Bristol freighter
had been blacked out with curtains so as not to disclose the
latter part of our route, the location of the test and the layout
of the test site.

Early in the morning we landed at the airfield of the
Woomera Long Range Weapons Establishment, several
hundred miles to the north. I had been there before and saw
nothing new there now to suggest that anything unusual was
afoot, except the food and drink that awaited us in a pre-
fabricated shed on the corner of the field and the fact that

184 ATOM HARVEST

several of the planes of the "atom fleet" were no longer there.
There were specially sealed Canberra jet-bombers standing out
of sight nearby ready to take off just before the test and measure
radioactivity in the atmosphere around the site. One of them,
with Group-Capt. Dennis Wilson, a radiologist attached to the
R.A.F. Central Medical Establishment, would fly straight
through the cloud minutes after the test to collect the first sample
of its contents.

After a quick "breakfast" we were ushered back into our
curtained plane for the last lap of our journey. There was still
an hour to dawn when we landed on the short, make-shift
airstrip at Emu. Brigadier Lucas came up to welcome us with
a friendly "Hallo" and shake of the hand and invited three of
us to join him in his jeep for the quick run to a piece of slightly
elevated ground a short distance from the field. Although
probably only a matter of a few feet above the rest of the plain,
it still enabled us to see across the flat forest of twisted mulga
trees, quondongs and sheoaks that looked like some ancient
petrified forest and separated us from the spot far on the horizon
where the bomb stood ready on its steel lattice tower.

The names of the planets had been used to label the final
stages of the Monte Bello test a year before. On this occasion
they used instead the names of some of Australia's many unique
animals. Early stages carried out during the night had been
referred to as DINGO, the native dog; EMU, the clumsy
Australian bird that cannot fly, GOANNA, the lizard ; KOALA,
the little bush bear, and KOOKABURRA, the laughing
jackass.

As we arrived at 6 a.m. the experts were carrying out duties
that bore the code word OPOSSUM, the final preparation of
the weapon. Twenty minutes later we heard the name PLATY-
PUS, that of the duckbilled mammal, come over the loud-
speaker. It meant that the lonely tower on the horizon was
finally being evacuated by an unnamed scientist who had com-
pleted the last circuit and had taken away with him the key
without which those in the control tower could proceed no
further.

It was clear that not everyone felt the same tension in those
last moments that we did; certainly not some of the Australians

THE SECOND BANG 185

who had done the real hard work of preparing for the test.
With plenty more hard work ahead of them and no immediate
part to play, they were having an extra hour in bed, it seemed.
An accident possibly on the part of the switchboard operator
on one occasion put through to our loudspeaker system remarks
that were clearly not intended for our consumption and we
heard u lazy bastards" being exhorted to get up and "show an
eye" or they would "blank well know what for".

The last moments before the test were heralded by a form
of drill that has now become a familiar part of such explo-
sions. Capt. Pat Cooper, a former naval officer, now technical
secretary to Dr. Penney, counted out the seconds before the
bang.

Observers had been told beforehand they could watch
through the extra-dark welder's glasses that had been provided
for the first part of the explosion. They were warned that if they
did they would miss many of the brilliant effects of the succeed-
ing stages on account of their eyes not becoming at once accus-
tomed to the change in brightness when they removed their
dark glasses.

The alternative, however, was to turn our backs on the
initial flash, as observers had done at Monte Bello, but this idea
did not appeal to any of us and we decided to watch through
our goggles, which were so black they almost obscured the
bright orb of the rising sun, and to whip them off at the first
sign of the explosion.

There were two masts on the distant horizon, one of them
enclosing the bomb and the second held ready for a further
explosion. From our position fourteen miles away they looked
like those of ships but with very large crows' nests showing
distantly upon the skyline. Each was some hundreds of feet
high; the one on the right we knew would soon be the site of a
blazing inferno.

There were about thirty-five in our desert "grandstand",
eighteen were reporters and photographers, mainly from Aus-
tralia. Only two of us had come from Britain for the test. Most
of the others present were senior members of the construction
team that had prepared the field and the site and the many
roads to the area, together with the ever-present security

l86 ATOM HARVEST

officers, who now carried heavy pistols in bulging leather
holsters slung over their shoulders.

There were now only seconds left before the weapon was due
to explode. As they passed, the sense of suspense was tremendous.
Deserts are rarely noisy places, and even when the promise of
food has attracted the eagles or carrion crows their dismal
squawkings only accentuate the unearthly stillness below. The
sound of each second, counted out over the loudspeaker, now
had the same eerie effect, and not even the photographers,
eagerly poised over their long-lensed cameras, made a sound as
we waited. The intervals between one second and the next
appeared to grow longer and longer. "Five . . . Four . . .
Three . . . Two . . . One. . . ."

We all had our own ideas of what to expect, based in some
cases on various full and vivid technical descriptions that we
had studied beforehand. But the more we had studied, I think,
the more we were stunned by the speed with which things
actually happened and were over. In dealing with an atomic
explosion the scientist uses as his unit of time the millisecond
or a thousandth part of a second.

The human brain, however, takes much longer to appreciate
what it sees and having registered the sight retains it for a good
twentieth part of a second more. Some idea of the inadequacy
of the human element in observing such explosions will be
realised by the fact that as each one-hundredth of a second
passes, the scene changes radically for something completely
new. Within one second the whole thing would be over and the
fireball of incandescent air and explosion debris would be on its
way upwards at a speed of between 100 and 200 m.p.h.

The explosion took place at 07.10 hours precisely according
to textbook. As Capt. Pat Cooper began to mouth the word
"Zero" a bursting, blinding ball of light appeared on the
skyline and the flash shot outwards towards the horizon in
every direction at a rate of 186,000 miles a second. We had
been warned that it would be brighter than the sun and through
my own special welder's screen, which enabled me to watch
while still keeping my eyes accustomed to daylight, it seemed
as if the surrounding desert were momentarily ablaze.

Earth fused and boiled in a blazing vortex which became

THE SECOND BANG 187

every moment more confused as it mingled with smoke and
dust, turned violet at the edges due to the compression wave,
and mixed with the deadly poisonous and peach-coloured
oxides of nitrogen. Most of us found our senses were paralysed.
Then the great and expanding mass of dirt and smoke was
suddenly sucked inwards and upwards in the wake of the
rapidly rising ball of fire until, at several thousand feet, it hesi-
tated for a few moments and bulged slightly on meeting a level
of different temperature before shooting upwards again in a
long great curve to form a characteristic mushroom shape
several miles to northward. Some saw in this great pillar of
smoke, sometimes dull grey and at other times a peachy pastel
shade, the typical fuzzy head of a great aboriginal Australian,
but it looked most of all like the thin smokestack of some
early steamship surmounted by its drifting column of smoke.

It had taken away our breath for a moment, but it was not
impressive in any real sense. The absence of any noise ruled
that out. The whole succession of events had followed through
in an eerie silence that made the whole affair seem almost
unreal. I realised, probably for the first time, how one's assess-
ment of any occurrence depends on a combination of many
senses and the effect that absence of any one of them to which
one is accustomed can have. I had never realised before the
extent to which one relies on sound. Without it now there was
something definitely wrong.

The flash could have been the bursting of a much smaller
bomb closer at hand and the solid column of hot gas poised
uncertainly over the desert reminded one of burning supply
dumps in Lybia during one of the great retreats. I wondered for
a moment whether any of us would have thought a great deal
about it had we not known of the cataclysmic nature of the
forces let loose and of the historic milestone which the successful
development of a practical atomic weapon meant to the Com-
monwealth. It left one with an odd feeling of detachment. I
must confess to having felt at the time an acute sense of dis-
appointment and anticlimax. It was all so small, so far away,
that I am sure I have derived far more excitement in the past
from the explosion of a halfpenny "demon" in a milk-bottle,
an orange or a bowl of blancmange.

l88 ATOM HARVEST

A minute passed before we were suddenly brought to our
senses by the bang. The sound reached us in the form of two
shattering shock waves which brought home to us all at once
the truly catastrophic violence of the process we had witnessed.
Had it been a mine or a conventional bomb or shell that had
gone off thirteen and a half miles away the noise would have
reached us as a dull "boom", blurred by distance. The noise
we heard, instead, was as sharp and incisive as if it had been
caused by a high-velocity gun a short distance away, fired
straight at us. It came like two stunning slaps in the face that
seemed to hit both ears twice in quick succession. And then
the double crash reverberated round the desert like a quite
unearthly thunder.

It reminded me for a moment of the sound of cannon fire
echoing round the mountains of India's North-West frontier,
only its magnitude was so much greater and there had been no
mountains within sight to provoke it. Sound waves and shock
waves are one and the same thing, and after an initial period
during which the exceptional conditions of an atomic explosion
cause the wave to travel outwards at more than the normal
speed of sound the noise travels outwards in all directions at a
speed which, under average conditions of temperature and
pressure and other atmospheric conditions, would be 1,086 feet
per second. The waves travel on until they hit something and
then they are reflected, unless the material is absorbent.

Sound waves can be reflected by solid objects like houses,
trees, mountains, and can be bent downwards by layers of air
of differing densities. Such reflections from the upper atmo-
sphere account for the fact that an explosion may often be
heard sixty or seventy miles away and yet not be heard at all
at some points much nearer to the source. It accounts for the
remarkable fact that the saluting guns in London at Queen
Victoria's funeral were heard in Edinburgh, nearly 400 miles
away, whilst during the First World War it was not at all un-
common to hear gunfire from the Western Front in London
and the Southern Counties.

It was a variation of the same effect that caused observers
twenty miles or more from the Monte Bello explosion to hear
two sharp bangs, which were then wrongly interpreted by some

THE SECOND BANG 189

as an indication that a hydrogen weapon had been exploded.
The second bang, which we also heard ourselves, is not always
due to reflections from above, however. Big explosions of any
sort produce a very complex shock picture that often defies
accurate analysis, and which may result in two or even more
separate bangs. With conventional explosives they may follow
too quickly for the ear to separate them. The bigger the ex-
plosion the longer is likely to be the time interval between them,
so that in an atomic blast they may be seconds apart.

Bangs of that sort take a bit of getting used to, but on this
occasion we were given no such chance. While the crash was
still thundering round the desert like hell let loose, security men
were already touching my elbow and telling me that there was
a breakfast ready of " curried beef and whiskey". The sugges-
tion brought me quickly to earth and the realisation that I only
had twenty-nine minutes in which to write and file my report.
Needless to say I ate no breakfast, and still without time for
reflection was reminded by Brigadier Lucas that I had better
jump into his jeep if I wanted to catch my plane.

Although we all had a pretty good idea of how long it would
take us to travel thirteen miles and we all thought we knew
exactly where we had seen the bomb go off, the task of identify-
ing the site from our plane was no easy one. The claypan was
scarred everywhere with the marks of smaller explosions used
in the testing of instruments.

Then, suddenly, I saw the spot. It was nothing but a circle
of burnt clay, black in the centre and elsewhere dark brown.
From its centre, slightly excavated by the explosion, radiated
innumerable scored rays over the area that, from our low flying
plane, appeared to have a radius possibly of 600-700 yards.
Except in the blackened centre, perhaps 200 yards across, the
scorings were not deep enough to erase tracks used by con-
structors' vehicles going to and from the central point where
the tower bearing the weapon had been. Of the tower itself
there was no sign.

Beyond the outer circle of dark brown earth it was difficult
to detect any effect at all. The ancient Mustang fighters that
had been flown out earlier to the area and placed at intervals
along the road radiating from the tower were apparently little

ATOM HARVEST

damaged, although several appeared to be well within the
mile of ground zero, the point directly below the explosion.
The same could be said of vehicles, radio equipment, military
stores and nissen huts.

What little time we had for careful examination did disclose,
however, a litter of small objects, probably torn from equip-
ment and scattered over the area. The absence of craters was
no surprise as many larger American weapons did not cause
craters when exploded from a height more than 250 feet above
the ground. Just how high the tower had been in the present
case was a closely guarded secret, but engineers told us that
it would have been technically possible to have constructed one
almost 1,000 feet high had they wanted to do so.

One of the most surprising facts was the almost complete
absence of the well-known incendiary effect of flash outside the
area of the main explosion. Although both vehicles and planes
had been left with full petrol tanks, none of them had been set
on fire, and the only sign of burning that I noticed outside the
immediate area of the explosion was some thousands of yards
away and might well have been the smoke from generators
purposely set off to enable instruments to follow the blast effect
on surrounding air by its displacement of the column of smoke.

We heard from Capt. Cooper that troublesome low-level
winds had been the cause of the test's repeated postponement.
On the day of the explosion low-level winds were present, but
at 10,000 feet there was a steady S.S.W. wind, which did not,
however, prevent the activity from the explosion being wafted
later eastwards towards the coast of New South Wales, although
by the time it reached there it was far too diffuse to do any
harm.

Thus forty hours later when I visited the laboratory in Can-
berra of Professor Oliphant, the eminent physicist, counters that
he had dispersed above the ground were registering the passage
overhead of the cloud and indicating activity due to X-rays
fifteen times higher than that normally present due to the
natural radioactivity. The level, which was well within safety
limits, nevertheless indicated quite clearly the presence of
radioactive explosion debris in the clouds overhead.

How Many Bombs?

HOW many atomic weapons and how much fissile material can
Britain now produce? The answer to these questions is one of
the country's most closely guarded secrets. Without any access
to unpublished and classified information, however, it is
possible to arrive at certain interesting conclusions without in
any way contravening the Official Secrets or Atomic Energy
Acts.

Let us take the facts as they are generally known. Every time
an atom of uranium is split it produces, on an average, two
and a half neutrons. One of these is required to split another
atom of uranium and keep the chain reaction going. A per-
centage is bound to be wasted by escape from the exterior walls
of the pile or in absorption by impurities, including fission
products of earlier reactions. It is reasonable for the purposes
of our present calculation to assume that there will, on an
average, be one neutron taken up by uranium 238 for each
fission and that this neutron will convert one gramme of
uranium 238 into plutonium. We may expect, therefore,
plutonium at the rate of an atom per atom of fuel used. This is
an optimistic statement of the .position but it is near enough.

A fairly simple calculation tells us that if a reactor burns one
gramme (one twenty-eighth part of one ounce) of uranium 235
a day the heat produced continuously will be of the order
of 1,000 kilowatts and approximately one gramme of the new
fuel, plutonium, will be produced. Now no-one has ever stated
what is the heat output of the two British production reactors
at the plutonium factory at Sellafield in Cumberland, but it is

191

ig2 ATOM HARVEST

generally known that the three American piles built at Hanfprd
for a similar purpose were of about 300,000 kilowatts each.

Assuming that the designers, with general knowledge but no
detailed technical information about these reactors, aimed at
a similar output for the Sellafield piles, we could then place
their combined daily output at somewhere in the neighbour-
hood of 600 grammes of plutonium a day within the reactor.
The efficiency of the extraction processes is secret knowledge,
but if it is of the order obtained in some comparable commercial
processes one might expect almost 100 per cent of this amount
to be extracted in fairly pure form, that is 600 grammes or
i 3 Ib a day.

Translating this figure into bombs is a little more difficult.
With only the early information to go by provided for us in the
Smyth Report, the United States report on the development
of atomic energy for military purposes, one would have to
place the figure for each bomb as being between 2 and 100
kilogrammes, that is between 4^ and 225 Ib. Within these
limits our production of bombs might vary between one hun-
dred bombs and two bombs every year if we had only the
Sellafield factory to depend on.

The critical mass of uranium or of any other fissile material
will obviously depend on the amount of impurities present. If
our bomb were made of uranium it would depend to a very
great extent on the amount of the greedy-for-neutrons 238 that
was still left behind by the diffusion process. It would obviously
depend, too, on the efficiency of the reflecting shield that en-
closed the bomb.

There is one further way in which the critical mass may be
reduced, and that is by the method of " implosion". An im-
plosion is, one might say, an explosion turned inside out. It
makes use of a fact known for some years but only really ex-
ploited in the latter stages of the Second World War. It is that
if a block of any normal explosive is machined or moulded to
the shape of a concave or hollow lens and detonated, the ex-
plosive force will be focused to a point in much the same way
as light rays would have been focused had they been passed
through an ordinary magnifying lens. There have been many
recent applications of this knowledge, the best known of which

HOW MANY BOMBS? 193

is probably the hollow-charge bomb used against tanks on the
battlefield. In atomic weapons, as the man in the street first
learned from the trial of the American atomic spy Greenglass,
who passed to Russia plans of the detonating mechanism, the
same principle can be used to produce suddenly a mass of
plutonium or uranium of extremely high density.

This is done by surrounding a central core of the atomic
explosive, itself too small to explode spontaneously, by a whole
series of lens-shaped charges of conventional explosive. If each
of these lens surfaces is lined with further amounts of plutonium
or uranium the effect of detonating the charges will be to propel
these additional amounts of uranium or plutonium simul-
taneously into the central mass, thus both adding to the total
quantity and increasing its density by the compressive effect.
This would do two things. First it could make the central mass
suddenly far greater than the critical size needed to bring about
spontaneous chain reaction. Secondly, by compressing the
whole mass, it would naturally bring each of the atoms of the
nuclear explosive closer to its neighbour and would reduce the
chances of neutrons reaching the surface and escaping before
they had caused further fissions.

The science of implosion, to which Sir William Penney him-
self made important contributions, was only in its infancy when
the first atomic weapons were being developed at Los Alamos,
New Mexico. "The obvious method of very rapidly assembling
an atomic bomb", as the Smyth Report said, "was to shoot
one part as a projectile in a gun against a second part as a
target." The projectile mass, projectile speed and gun calibre
required were not far from the range of standard ordnance
practice. There is no doubt whatsoever that it is a method that
has long been superseded by that of implosion, and we may
assume that it very much reduced the minimum amount of
fissile material required for the manufacture of an atomic bomb.

Bearing this in mind, and also our knowledge that the energy
released by a " nominal atomic bomb", one equivalent to
twenty kilotonnes, was equal to that made available by the
fission of one kilogramme of plutonium, let us assume that
because of losses and the inherent inefficiency of the system
about four times this quantity, i.e. four kilogrammes or nine
"3

194 ATOM HARVEST

pounds, of fissile material will be required. We then see that
the yearly production figure we took would suffice for more
than fifty atomic bombs.

That figure, no more than a guess, is based on an assumption
of what might be done with the two Windscale reactors, the
only source of plutonium in Britain likely to be producing
plutonium on a large scale until 1957. It takes no account of
the Capenhurst factory, where uranium 235 is produced, or the
production from the many other reactors scheduled to make
substantial and growing contributions in the next few years.

The term " atomic bomb" is used loosely above. Each one
of these bombs might well be used as the detonator of a hydro-
gen bomb. They could be something much worse, a weapon
that Professor Rotblat has called the " fission-fusion-fission"
bomb. Let us take the first suggestion.

It is no secret that the first American hydrogen "bomb" was
far from being a droppable affair. It needed a barn to house it
and depended on a refrigeration system to maintain the hydro-
gen in its liquid state (it boils at about minus 270 degrees
Centigrade). It became known as the wet bomb. It is no secret
either that reports of the first Russian hydrogen bomb indi-
cated that it was, instead, a "dry" one, far more easy to handle
and quite conceivably portable. It has been widely suggested,
and it is very generally believed by scientists both in the United
States and in Europe, that this great advance in the technique
of bomb-making was realised by the use of hydrogen in a solid,
stable form, that of a chemical compound of hydrogen and a
particular form of the lightweight metal, lithium.

To see how this could be of use let us go back for a moment
to the wet bomb. The idea here, without going into too many
details, was to make heavy hydrogen, known as deuterium, fuse
with more heavy hydrogen to form helium, the next element
in the list. To do this all that was required was heat much
more heat than could be produced by the explosion of an
ordinary atomic bomb.

To bridge this gap a tinder was employed. The ingredients
proposed were deuterium and a further, super-heavy and very
rare form of hydrogen known as tritium. Deuterium and tritium
will fuse together at a temperature well below that needed if

HOW MANY BOMBS? IQ5

deuterium is used on its own and that temperature can be ob-
tained from a well designed uranium or plutonium bomb.
Thus, the "wet" bomb used an ordinary atomic bomb as the
spark, a mixture of deuterium and tritium as the tinder, and
deuterium on its own, as much as anyone cared to pile on, as
the main fuel.

Although tritium, like deuterium, occurs in nature, the
amount is so small as to be insignificant, and in the quantities
needed for nuclear weapons it had to be obtained in atomic
reactors by the expensive process of bombarding the metal
lithium with neutrons much needed already for the production
of plutonium.

The "dry" bomb had a much easier way out than all this.
It combined the two processes together by using a solid sub-
stance, lithium deuteride, and performed the operation while
the bomb was bursting. Talking broadly and taking some
liberties with scientific terminology in the interests of simpli-
city it might be said to have worked like this. First the atom
bomb goes off. This produces an enormous surplus of neutrons.
These neutrons are absorbed by the lithium to form tritium.
The tritium then reacts with the deuterium to form helium.
The tremendous heat produced by this reaction provides the
"tinder" needed to start fusion of the remainder of the heavy
hydrogen. The violence of the explosion would then only be
limited by the amount of heavy hydrogen available in solid
form.

We spoke of one further possibility. At the time I write it has
never been mentioned in public before. It is based, however,
on analyses by leading nuclear physicists of the known results
of certain other explosions.

The deuteride bomb had become known as the "cheap"
hydrogen bomb, because it avoided the use of the expensive
tritium and led to great simplification in design. But it still
required large quantities of heavy hydrogen, which is made
from the very expensive commodity, heavy water. There might
be an even cheaper way.

It will be remembered that when atomic reactors were being
discussed earlier in the book it was stated that the compara-
tively common variety of uranium known as 238 greedily

196 ATOM HARVEST

gobbled up neutrons of some lower energies in a reaction that
produced plutonium but endangered the fission process. Fast
neutrons, instead, would cause uranium 238 to undergo fission
itself.

Now, the deuteride bomb reaction outlined above would
produce a vast number of fast neutrons. The economics of
bomb manufacture might be completely changed if a way
could be found to utilise these neutrons to bring about fission
of the more plentiful 238 uranium used in an outer shell, nor
could any better substance be found to "tamp'' the bomb and
prevent it from flying apart too soon, in much the same way
as miners tamp the hole and increase the effect of conventional
explosives when they are blasting.

The suggestion has in fact been made that it might have been
the unforeseen detonation of such a " tamper", an outer shell
of uranium 238, which led to the unexpected violence of the
test hydrogen bomb explosion in the Pacific on March i, 1954,
and the unusually widespread contamination that resulted in
many casualties. Responsible physicists outside the Atomic
Energy Authority tell me that the effect, impossible to obtain
from a simple hydrogen, or fusion, bomb, could have been
achieved by the use of a shell of natural uranium one inch thick.

So now we have a new sort of super bomb that any country
with a substantial atomic energy programme could manufacture
relatively easily and which combines tremendous explosive
power with the power to contaminate anything from 5,000 to
100,000 square miles of territory.

From a military point of view it puts the so-called "cobalt
bomb" in the shade. The cobalt bomb, which has never been
and is never likely to be exploded, would be an "ordinary"
hydrogen bomb surrounded by a shell of the metal cobalt.
When such a bomb went off many of the neutrons produced by
the fusion of the hydrogen atoms would be absorbed by the
cobalt to form a new and highly radioactive form of the metal
known as cobalt 60.

Now cobalt 60 is far more deadly than radium. Exploded
anywhere in the world it would produce results too horrible
to contemplate. There is a very good reason why such a bomb
is never likely to be used. The cobalt 60 "decays", that is loses

HOW MANY BOMBS? IQ7

its radioactivity, at the rate of half every 5*3 years. Since it
takes an average of 1,700 hours for particles of bomb debris to
fall to earth from the stratosphere, they might have been
carried several times round the world, without having lost any
appreciable percentage of their original activity, before falling
to earth on the territory alike of friend and foe.

The position with the fission-fusion-fission bomb, that using
a shell of uranium 238, is very different instead. The products
when this shell undergoes fission will be very similar to those of
an ordinary atomic bomb of uranium 235 or plutonium. The
majority of them will be intensely radioactive for a compara-
tively short time and those that are not deposited within some
hundreds of miles of the explosion within a few hours will have
lost much of their virulence before they reach the earth.

The explosion of a single such bomb might lay waste and
contaminate thousands of square miles of enemy territory
without constituting any greater risk to the user than did, say,
the Bikini explosion of March 1945.

Isotopes Friends of Man

THERE are ninety-two different naturally-occurring elements in
the world, to which man has, since the inception of the atomic
era, added nine more of his own making. The lightest of all
these elements, we have seen, is the gas hydrogen ; the heaviest,
element number 101, was recently discovered by scientists of
the University of California and given the name mendeleevium
in recognition of the nineteenth-century scientist Dmitri
Ivanovitch Mendeleev, who is generally given credit for being
the first to arrange the elements satisfactorily in systematic
fashion.

As far back as 1829 scientists had been trying to establish a
relationship between the weights of the known elements and
their behaviour. At first these attempts were severely handi-
capped by the lack of any precise knowledge of what those
different weights were. Then the Italian chemist Cannizzaro
made a great step forward in 1858 and very soon it was possible
to arrange the elements in something very like their correct
order. But it was Mendeleev who provided the first clear-cut
picture of a general and simple law that ordered the elements
in what he called the Periodic Table.

In his table Mendeleev arranged all the elements according
to their weights and showed that there was a regular recurrence
of certain chemical and physical properties that in many cases
ran right through the table. It was just as if someone had dealt
out the elements like a pack of cards, starting with the lightest
of them and finishing with the heaviest. All cards in the same
"hand" showed this special relationship to each other.

198

ISOTOPES FRIENDS OF MAN

The scientific explanation of this fact is quite outside the
scope of the present discussion. The only point that interests us
is that each element has its own place in the table. Its behaviour
can be forecast from knowledge of the place that it occupies,
with such certainty in some cases that in the early days when
many elements that we know now remained undiscovered, it
was already possible to see that these blanks existed and to
prophesy that elements would later be found to occupy them
and to say how those elements would behave. Mendeleev
himself made three such predictions that were borne out by
later discoveries.

His table, it will be remembered, had been based on an
arrangement of the elements in the order of their weights.
There was only one element in each place. The weight of the
element, by determining its position in the table determined
also its chemical and sometimes its physical behaviour. The
key to the theory was "one element, one place", and con-
versely, "one place, one element".

By 1910, scientists in many countries were baffled by the dis-
covery that in some cases the theory did not hold good. Soddy,
the English physicist, reviewing the position in that year,
pointed out that ionium, thorium and radio-thorium, all differ-
ent by weight, still behaved chemically as if they were identical.
There were a number of others that showed similar exceptions
to the rule.

In 1913 Soddy proposed the word "isotope", derived from
the Greek isos, equal, and topos, place, to describe elements
which had different weights but which, as far as chemical
behaviour was concerned, appeared to occupy the same
"place".

Aston, one of Cockcroft's early colleagues, quickly showed
that the gas neon had two isotopic forms, weighing 20 and
22 units respectively and both behaving exactly like each other.
There was always about ten times as much of the lighter isotope
present as there was of the heavier one.

This provided an immediate explanation of why the weight
of neon, in its normal, naturally-occurring form had been
found to be 20*2 units instead of a whole number of units.
Aston went on to show that the gas chlorine, which was known

2OO ATOM HARVEST

to weigh 35*457 units, consisted of at least two different iso-
topes which weighed 35 and 37 units respectively.

It had, of course, been known since the turn of the century
that while some elements were " stable" and remained always
the same, there were others like radium, that were " unstable"
and emitted radiation of one sort or another, changing their
identity in the process and becoming different elements.

The quest for knowledge became far more exciting when
Rutherford showed in 1919 that it was possible to use the rays
emitted by one substance to bombard another and change its
identity, and when Cockcroft and Walton, in 1932, achieved
similar transmutations with the electrical machines that
scientists called accelerators but which rapidly became known
to most as "atom smashers".

The earliest elements to be produced in this way were stable,
but soon it was shown that radioactive elements could be made
as well. By the time the Second World War broke out many
such forms were known and, ten years later, what with the
incentive supplied by atomic energy research and the new
facilities that were available such as atomic reactors and ever
more powerful atom-smashing machines, something like 1,000
different isotopic forms of the elements had been discovered in
nature or manufactured by man. Of these, many were radio-
active and there had been found at least one radioactive form,
or "radio-isotope", of every stable element.

The "rays" emitted by the active forms are of many different
sorts, some of very high powers of penetration and others with
hardly any power of penetration at all, so that they can be
stopped even by a small amount of air or a piece of paper. It
soon became apparent they had tremendous potentialities.

It has been said of these radio-isotopes that they represent in
fact the happiest chapter in the atom story. On many occasions
it has been predicted that when present atomic energy pro-
grammes are reviewed in the light of history, it will not be the
gigantic power-producing reactors or nuclear weapons that
will claim pride of place, but the contribution to humanity of
the many ray-emitting substances that first came into abundant
supply when men began building atomic piles for other
purposes.

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21. A television set being used at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment,
Harwell, for microscopic examination of a specimen that is far too radioactive to
be examined by direct methods.

22. A radioactive crystal of the metal zirconium,
photographed through a microscope by means
of television to see what damage it has suffered
by a period of irradiation in an atomic reactor.

23. An "autoradiograph 15 of a young ash
plant, made by allowing it to remain in con-
tact with a photographic emulsion after it has
taken up water containing radio-phosphorus.
Cells in the process of growth have taken up
most. Reproduced by courtesy of Kodak Ltd.

ISOTOPES FRIENDS OF MAN 201

They are, as we have seen, atoms with a difference. The
difference lies in the fact that they can be traced wherever they
go and identified for what they are, however few of them there
may be. Using the right instruments it is as easy to trace the
presence of a minute quantity of some radio-isotope amongst a
great mass of other material as it is to see the blazing torch of
a skier on a mountainside or rockets fired from a nearby ship.

Chemically, however, these radioactive isotopes behave in
exactly the same fashion as ordinary, stable isotopes of the
same element. Thus, if food containing a quantity of radio
phosphorus is fed to an animal, a plant or a human being, it
would be absorbed in a perfectly normal fashion. The radio
phosphorus would later on be found dispersed in all the usual
places where phosphorus from food accumulates, such as in the
bones of an animal or leaves of a plant.

Its presence there and elsewhere would be detectable through
the use of Geiger counters placed nearby, and if one of the
leaves were subsequently put on a plate of photographic
emulsion suitably shielded from the light and the plate after-
wards developed, there would afterwards be found an "auto-
radiograph", that is to say a photograph taken by the plant
itself (Plate 23).

Little black spots would have been produced on the film
wherever a ray from the leaf had hit the emulsion. There would
naturally be most spots in areas where there had been most
phosphorus and this would prove to be in the stem and along
the many branching channels which form a lace-like pattern
over the leaf. The result would provide an accurate outline of
the whole of the structure of the leaf if left there long enough.

While it may be convenient to lay a leaf or other small object
on a photographic plate and allow it to photograph itself, the
same is obviously not possible with an object as large and un-
wieldly as the human body, nor would it remain in the same
position long enough, probably, to secure the desired effect.
In the workshops of the Royal Marsden Hospital I recently
saw an ingenious answer to this problem in the form of a fully
automatic "robot" which could draw a "map" of the whole
body in fifteen minutes, showing exactly how a radioactive
substance had dispersed itself in various organs.

2O2 ATOM HARVEST

This "scanner", a piece of delicate machinery about one
yard square and one foot high, contains a "counter", about
the size of a pint milk-bottle, which travels backwards and
forwards across the body in much the same way that a paper-
hanger eventually covers the whole of a wall. As it travels
across each part the counter measures the amount of radiation,
if any, that is being emitted. The electric pulses that result are
magnified many times and used to operate a stylo travelling
in exactly the same way across a sheet of paper bearing an out-
line of the body. Whenever the counter passes a radioactive
area of the body the stylo shades the picture on the paper.

Like many other devices for the detection and cure of disease
that have been conceived in the same hospital and are now
being copied with its ready approval in institutions all over the
world, the scanner was designed and its construction directed
by Prof. W. V. Mayneord, one of the leading authorities on the
biological effects of radiation and a pioneer in the use of radio-
isotopes in medicine.

Mayneord is a red-bearded genius with a rare ability for
translating thoughts into nuts and bolts. The scanner, in addi-
tion to fulfilling the function for which it was designed, has
already shown important possibilities in a further direction.
This came about when it revealed localised "pockets" of radio-
activity in unexpected parts of the body. On their being
further investigated, medical men found that they came from
unsuspected metastases, that is, secondary growths of an earlier
cancer that were not detected by normal methods. There is
other evidence that these secondary growths may take up
iodine to a greater extent than normal cells, and in some
cases the amount taken up is enough to destroy the new growth.
In this way the unsuspecting cancer cells have taken in the
radio-isotope for their own destruction.

All living cells are liable to suffer damage from radioactive
radiation passing through them, but this sensitivity enormously
increases while the cell concerned is in a process of "division",
that is to say, while it is in the act of reproducing itself. Thus,
the reproductive organ of the human body and also the cells
in bone marrow responsible for producing new blood are all
particularly sensitive to such radiation.

ISOTOPES FRIENDS OF MAN 203

For the very same reason, cells of a malignant growth, or
cancer, which sometimes reproduce at a phenomenal rate, are
also easily damaged, and it is for this reason, of course, that
sources of radiation, whether they be naturally-occurring
radio-isotopes like radium or artificially-produced ones such as
cobalt 60, or even the great electronic machines, are used in the
treatment of malignant disease.

The hope is always that the rays will kill the rapidly repro-
ducing cells of the cancer without doing too much damage to
the surrounding healthy tissue. This treatment can be very
effective, especially when the tumour is on the surface, but there
are many cases where it will not work. Thus, the discovery of
ray-emitting substances that could be introduced easily with
food into the body and that could be relied upon to concen-
trate in certain organs immediately suggested to scientists and
doctors a new chance to attack many deep-seated tumours in
the body if only the suitable radio elements could be found that
would accumulate there and nowhere else.

The thyroid gland seemed to offer such an opportunity, for
this important organ which controls the growth of the body
is situated in a part of the neck where surgery is often hazard-
ous. The thyroid gland is greedy of iodine so that it attracts to
itself the greater part of any quantity of iodine that enters the
body. It is also an organ that is attacked by cancer. Here,
however, as in many other cases, early hopes were not borne
out. For one thing, the power of the thyroid to concentrate
iodine depends on its remaining healthy. When a tumour occurs
in the gland the cells lose their power to function in a normal
manner and then they cease to concentrate the iodine.

Radio iodine first became available in 1938. Since then it
has been of outstanding value in the study of thyroid function
in diseases other than cancer, and it has been possible to use
quantities which, although easily detectable, were far too small
to do harm. The radiations emitted by radio iodine are in fact
so penetrating that even minute quantities may be followed
as they make their way through various organs of the body. The
very short half-lives of some varieties make them suitable for
short-term diagnostic tests where total body radiation can be
kept down to an almost negligible level.

2O4 ATOM HARVEST

The most obvious application of radioactive material in
medicine is the use of substances like cobalt 60 or caesium 137
as substitutes for the far more expensive radium. The difficulty
in the case of cobalt lies in its manufacture, but caesium is be-
coming available in increasing quantities as a by-product of
normal atomic reactions.

It will be remembered that one of the factors governing the
manufacture of radio-isotopes in a pile is the probability that
any particular neutron will be absorbed by the target nucleus
and able to convert it to the new form. This, in the case of
cobalt, is a very low probability indeed, and it could only be
made economically in reactors like the heavy water reactor at
Chalk River and the new 443 reactor under construction at
Harwell, where the flux of neutrons, that is to say, the number
crossing a given area in a given time, is high and the probability
of collisions is large in consequence.

The development of atomic reactors like these, where the
number of neutrons crossing a given square inch of surface in
one second may be more than a hundred million million, has
made possible the manufacture of sources of cobalt 60 so powerful
that a source less than one inch in diameter and one- tenth of one
inch thick can deliver a dose rate of thirty to forty rontgen units
per minute at a distance of two and a half feet. The X-rays
so produced are in every way comparable with a beam of X-rays
produced by a super-voltage machine. The mountings are often
very much more flexible.

Some of them permit the "bomb" containing the cobalt to
make a complete circle round the point within the patient on
which the beam is to be concentrated. The advantage of such a
procedure is that while the growth itself will be under constant
bombardment any given part of the surface and intervening
tissue will be exposed only for a small fraction of this period.

Units of this sort may contain cobalt giving radiation equiva-
lent to as much as two pounds of radium. Far smaller ones,
containing one hundredth or one two-hundredth of this amount,
are also used, with the added advantage in certain cases that
the beam may be controlled within stricter limits.

Apart from the fact, however, that cobalt is not a natural
fission product and can only be satisfactorily manufactured in

ISOTOPES FRIENDS OF MAN 2O5

atomic reactors of great power, it has the further disadvantage
that the half-life of cobalt 60, once it has been made, is only
5 -3 years.

In a well-planned hospital, however, a great deal of work can
be done in the period before its strength has fallen off. The
source can always, too, be put back into a pile for further
" hotting up" by new periods of neutron bombardment. Its
comparatively short half-life, however, has been one of the
reasons why interest has recently swung to other elements like
caesium, which has a half-life of thirty-three years and is a
natural product of the normal fission reaction and is readily
separated by chemical means from the other fission products.

Plans are going ahead to use radio-caesium units in a number
of hospitals. This substance has the good point that shielding
of workers from the rays that it emits is far simpler than in
the case of cobalt. Against this must be weighed the fact that
the dose delivered in a given time is much smaller and units
need therefore to be larger.

In the same way that man-made radio-isotopes have re-
placed naturally-occurring substances like radium and radon
in "telecurie" units, that is to say, devices used to bombard
malignant growths from a distance, they also offer many ad-
vantages over substances like radon gas in the close treatment
of disease. Radon is a highly radioactive gas emitted by radium
when it decays. The old practice, still maintained in most
countries, is to collect this gas and to seal it into hair-like tubes
of gold known as "needles" or " seeds".

Radon seeds suffer from many disadvantages. For a start,
the radiation they emit is of short life and is not all of one kind.
Some of it being far too energetic for convenience. Seeds cannot
be delivered in Britain in less than a week from time of order,
and seeds in a batch vary greatly in activity. Variations in
length and diameter are such that most devices designed to
permit introduction of a number of shots in succession around
a tumour are rendered unreliable due to jamming. It is just as
if an attempt were made to fire cartridges of slightly varying
shape from a repeating rifle.

The recent possibility of activating gold in atomic piles has
led the Royal Marsden Hospital in London to devise a new

206 ATOM HARVEST

"gun" which uses seeds of radio gold contained in thin tubes
of platinum and which has proved very reliable. Unlike guns
with which most of us have been associated this one can be,
and is, boiled before use !

The variety of radio elements now available has led to a
number of other ingenious methods of application in this field,
Wires of radio tantalum in platinum tubes have been intro-
duced into internal organs, and radio cobalt, in the form of a
powder or small spheres incorporated in a malleable plastic
medium, has been used to fit closely to a particular part of the
body.

One of the most ingenious uses of radioactive material for
irradiation purposes has been in the form of a solution or fluid
suspension introduced into body cavities infiltrated into the
tumour itself. Fine particles of known size have been injected
also into arteries and veins in such a way that they would be
trapped in fine blood vessels like the lung and remain there
near the seat of the growth that needs to be destroyed.

Many of the methods described are already being used in
hospitals while others are still in the experimental stage and
may never be widely used. Experience gained is constantly
leading to improvements and variations.

It is of interest to note that while nearly one thousand radio-
active forms of different elements have been manufactured,
only a relatively small number of them at present appear to
have any application in the medical field. Among those pro-
duced by "otoking" or irradiation in atomic reactors are
various isotopes of bromine, cobalt, gold, iridium, phosphorus,
sodium and tantalum. Fission products used include different
forms of the elements caesium, strontium, barium and lantha-
num. Of these only phosphorus and iodine have shown any
tendency to select any organs or tumour tissue to an extent that
permits them to be used safely for curative purposes.

It was widely hoped at first that the possibilities of intro-
ducing some ray-emitting substance into the blood might prove
an effective answer to some of the insidious malignant diseases
of the blood that have successfully evaded all other methods of
treatment. Most of these diseases are due to the uncontrolled
multiplication of one sort of blood cell or another. With one

ISOTOPES FRIENDS OF MAN 2O7

exception, attempts in this direction have up till now been
disappointing.

Some of the most significant and potentially useful advances
in the medical and biological field have been made in the gain-
ing of fundamental knowledge of natural processes where
radio-isotopes have been used as "tracers".

The idea here is to "label " one or more atoms in each molecule
of a particular compound, use it in food, and see where it ends
up and in what form. One of the most interesting applications
here is in the study of the "metabolic" functions of the body,
in the many processes of construction and destruction that go
on within the cells of the body.

The nuclear physicists and chemists have now succeeded in
producing suitable radioactive forms of most of the biologically
important elements, with the notable and important exceptions
of oxygen and nitrogen.

The term "suitable" here needs some explaining. The type
of radiation produced is obviously of importance, but the
flexibility of the various counting devices and techniques now
used enables research workers to adapt their methods to suit
a wide range of radiation energies. Of far more basic signifi-
cance is the half-life of the isotope concerned. These vary from
small fractions of one second to millions of years. When used on
human subjects radio-isotopes must not belong to either of
these extremes. They would obviously be of no use if they de-
cayed before the experiment was completed, and too long a life
would prevent repetition of the experiment and might result
in danger to the patient's health. It might also cause difficulties
in eventual disposal of wastes.

[20]

The Atomic Egg

THE diversity of the uses to which radio-isotopes may be put in
medicine is as nothing compared to the possibilities in scientific
research and industry and it may safely be said that up till now
the surface of this immense subject has barely been scratched.
It really seems that no suggested application can be too fantastic.

The high penetrating power of rays emitted by cobalt 60
enable steel plates six inches thick to be photographed in search
of defects more simply than the body is photographed for
broken bones, and the insides of coal retorts in gas works can
even be examined while coking is in progress to see the state of
the reaction.

Sources of less penetration may be used with equal effect to
examine thin sheets of aluminium. A variation of the same
application is one in which the beam of rays passing through a
continuous strip of metal in a rolling mill is allowed to impinge
on a measuring device which automatically stops the mill if the
thickness of the newly rolled plate is greater or less than it
should be.

The same use of interrupted beams can be applied to an un-
limited degree in the factory production line, as, for example,
when bottles are checked to see that they are sufficiently full or
match-boxes are scanned to make sure that approximately the
right number are going into each box.

In the oilfields the injection of a small amount of ray-
emitting material into a pipeline at the same moment that a
new grade of oil is about to be delivered has proved to be a
simple and effective way of telling those several hundreds or

208

THE ATOMIC EGG 2OQ

thousands of miles away when the moment has come to switch
over the feed into a new tank.

Another pipeline application has been used, as it were, on our
very doorsteps. The isotope radiosodium has demonstrated on
many occasions in Britain the ease with which leaks may be
detected in long stretches of buried water-piper or sewer. There
are several ways of doing this, but the description of one of
them will suffice here. It relies on the fact that, if water con-
taining radioactive sodium is passed through the pipe under
pressure, it will accumulate in the ground around any leak.
After a short time the pipe is well flushed out. The position of
a faulty portion of pipe will then be readily detected by virtue
of the activity that has been left behind in the soil.

Radioactive gold found an unusual and money-saving use in
the detection of faulty filters in the brewing industry. The
filters in question are of finely packed asbestos wool and their
object is to keep out of the beer microscopic material that
might later make the beer turn cloudy.

Filters are normally tested daily by a process that takes from
two to four days to complete by conventional methods and
much beer is wasted before the defective filter is discovered.
Using radio-isotopes, however, the test takes only half an hour.

What the scientists did was to take granules of carbon of
about the same size as the microscopic organism which nor-
mally causes the cloudiness. The carbon was then coated with
radio gold and a watch kept for this ray-emitting material in
the filtered beer. If any got through, the beer would be rejected
and the filter changed, but so long as the filters remained in good
condition the gold would be held back and the finished beer
would remain uncontaminated.

A completely different use of a radio-isotope and one that
will undoubtedly find wide application is in testing the effi-
ciency of a mixing process where it is essential to make sure
that a small quantity of one substance is evenly distributed over
a much larger amount of another.

Animal foodstuffs provide an excellent example in the case of
manganese, a most important dietary additive of which, never-
theless, only about half of one dessertspoonful is required in
every ton of feed.
'4

210 ATOM HARVEST

A big manufacturer wanted to know how efficient the various
mixing equipment was that he was using and applied to Har-
well for help. The answer was provided in a very short time by
putting some of the manganese compound into an atomic
reactor for a period to render it radioactive. Sensitive counting
apparatus was then used to measure the activity in the different
bags.

The pigs did not need to worry, for within two days the
activity, never very great, would have decayed to one millionth
of its original strength.

The lethal effects of more powerful sources of radiation have
been used in certain circumstances to kill germs and may one
day provide a new and simple method of preparing dead
vaccines to protect human beings from disease. Work is going
on, too, in several countries to discover whether food could be
sterilised in this fashion after canning to avoid the present
system of cooking, which in many cases destroys the vitamin
content of the food.

In the plastics industry a number of most novel phenomena
have recently been brought to light which demonstrate the far-
reaching effect that radiation can have on the structure and
linkage of aggregates of atoms. A block of perspex, for example,
may look completely unchanged after a short period of irradia-
tion within a pile, but the moment it is heated it will disin-
tegrate into a mass of foam-like sponge. In just the same way
that this demonstrates a breaking down of links between atoms,
another case demonstrates exactly the opposite effect.

Say, for example, that a rod of polythene has been irradiated
for a period in an atomic reactor and is then bent into a curve
by the use of pressure and a little heat. On being further heated
the polythene will demonstrate a "memory" for its original
shape and the curved rod will tend to straighten itself out
again.

There are some scientists who believe that this ability of
radiation to disturb the normal linkage between atoms may be
of tremendous importance to the chemical industry and that
many substances may one day be made to react together, under
the influence of atomic rays, that would normally show no
inclination to do so. New substances of complicated structure

THE ATOMIC EGG 211

and of great potential use to man may thus be formed from the
simplest of raw materials.

There is nothing revolutionary in this conception when it is
remembered that heat radiation is commonly used to bring
about or to speed up chemical changes, while some of the most
complicated substances that we know, the proteins of living
things, are synthesised in nature from extremely simple things
like carbon dioxide with the aid of light-rays from the sun that
are closely related to some types of atomic radiation.

The cases so far described have been fairly straightforward
ones in which activised substances have been relatively simple
ones, often composed of a single element like radio gold or
radio cobalt. Demands for such materials, manufactured simply
by irradiating suitable raw materials for periods in atomic
piles or bombarding them in atom-smashing machines, are
usually met by the Isotope Division of Dr. H. Seligman at
Harwell.

In many instances, however, a far more complex and delicate
substance needs to be labelled or "tagged" in such a way that
only one of its atoms, the same one in each case, needs to be
radioactivised. Often in such a case a period of treatment in a
pile would lead to destruction of the specimen or promiscuous
labelling of many different atoms. In such instances the only
way to achieve the desired result may be by a lengthy, step-by-
step chemical synthesis.

For this sort of work, and also for the handling of radium and
radon, a separate establishment, known as the Radiochemical
Centre, exists at Amersham, Bucks. Under its director, Dr.
W. P. Grove, substances are prepared which, by virtue of the
painstaking and skilled work that has gone into their making,
may cost many hundreds of pounds for no more of the material
than would cover a sixpenny-piece.

Using only BEPO, the larger of the two graphite reactors
at the Harwell establishment, the departments of Dr. Seligman
and Dr. Grove have between them increased the number of
yearly consignments from 135 in 1947 and 7,443 in 1950 to
nearly 20,000 a year in 1954. Of these latter, 7,252 consign-
ments were sent overseas in 1954 alone, making Britain the
largest exporter of radioactive materials in the world.

212 ATOM HARVEST

Up till now forty-seven different countries, including such
widely scattered places as the United States, New Zealand,
Zanzibar and Russia, have bought radio-isotopes from Britain
for research purposes or for the investigation or treatment of
disease.

It goes without saying that the delivery of such consignments
is a special problem on its own. Some of them are relatively
long-lived, but the majority lose much of their activity in a
matter of weeks. All are ray-emitting, and while the penetrating
nature of the rays varies tremendously all must be conveyed
under conditions of extra special care and surveillance. For this
purpose the wing-tips of planes are often used and all new air-
craft of British Overseas Airways Corporation have special
compartments in their wings for this purpose, where packages
may be carried in safety.

Of all the varied uses that these many deliveries of radio-
active material from Britain's atomic energy establishments have
been put to, none, I think, can be more fantastic in a way than
that of a consignment of radioactive green pondweed that left
Amersham a year or so ago for the National Institute of Medical
Research at Mill Hill. Few, either, could have followed so
devious a path from the atomic reactor to their eventual
destination.

The institute is one of the many departments of the Medical
Research Council which advises the Government on all ques-
tions of medical science. Its members usually have set tasks
that occupy a proportion of their time but they are encouraged
to spend the rest of their time in tackling fundamental problems.

One of these workers, Dr. John Humphrey, wanted to study
the body's protective mechanisms against disease. What usually
happens when a virus or germ gains access to the body is that
vast numbers of ''antibodies" are formed to fight it. No-one
knows just how or why these are formed, and very little is
known, either, of the way in which they combat disease. The
ability to provoke the production of antibodies is not limited,
either, to active carriers of disease. Dead or weakened forms of
bacteria and viruses can do so too and are used, of course, to
step up the body's resistance to specific diseases like smallpox
or poliomyelitis. Many harmless chemicals also have the effect

THE ATOMIC EGG 213

of creating antibodies when they enter the bloodstream, and an)
substance, live or dead, which has this property is known as ar
"antigen".

Dr. Humphrey, who read biochemistry at Cambridge anc
then gained a medical doctorate at University College Hospital
London, joined the National Institute after some years at the
Lister Institute and as a pathologist. His routine task is tc
look after the international standards of antibiotic drugs,
While at Mill Hill he decided to study protective mechanisms ol
the body using albumen or egg-white as an antigen. In ordei
to see what happened to the albumen molecules after they had
been "attacked" by the antibodies, he planned to label each
molecule of albumen by making its contained carbon atoms
radioactive.

This was not easy, however, for radioactive carbon is made
by irradiating, not carbon itself, but another element, nitrogen,
Thus, even if albumen would have survived a period of irradia-
tion in an atomic reactor the desired result would still not have
been achieved.

With Dr. J. R. Catch of the Radiochemical Centre, Amer-
sham, Humphrey found an ingenious way out. First, they would
make radio carbon by irradiating a nitrogenous substance in a
reactor. The carbon would then be burned to form carbon
dioxide, which could be bubbled into a basin of the green pond-
weed known as chlorella.

The chlorella would, just like any other plant, "breathe" in
the carbon dioxide and use it to synthesise normal protein
tissue. This protein, which would thus contain radioactive
carbon, could then be fed to a chicken, which would in due
course, it was hoped, lay an egg containing radioactive albu-
men. This very long way round was necessary because man has
not yet succeeded in synthesising albumen himself.

While Dr. Catch was arranging for the supply of radioactive
chlorella, Dr. Humphrey carried out pilot experiments to see
how long it took chlorella to turn up in the egg after being fed
to a hen. Six birds were studied, and Henrietta, a particularly
handsome White Leghorn, was selected for the experiment
because of the large eggs that she laid and her apparent abso-
lute reliability. A lot was at stake for the chlorella had cost 300.

214 ATOM HARVEST

At first, Dr. Humphrey tells me, everything went according
to plan and Henrietta laid an egg which contained one-
twentieth of an ounce of moderately active albumen. The really
valuable egg should have been the next one. At that moment,
however, Henrietta apparently began to suspect that she was
being made a fool of. Perhaps too much attention was showered
on her. At any rate she stopped laying.

"We began to get really worried", Humphrey confesses.
When no more eggs came Henrietta had to be killed and the
egg extracted from the oviduct. It contained i 8 gramme, about
one-fifteenth of an ounce, of very highly radioactive albumen,
worth more than 200, which was later crystallised and purified.
Other organs of the bird also contained radioactive material
and were equally valuable for future research and these and all
but one-quarter of the albumen were sent back to Amersham
to remain in stock against the day when more workers ask for
these substances.

[21]

The Genetic Price

INCREASING use of atomic energy processes both in the weapons
field and also in hospitals, research institutions and in industry
has emphasised the urgent need to find out more about their
effect on the human body, and discussions in and outside
parliament have emphasised the sketchy nature of man's
knowledge in this vital field.

The problem is basically one of human genetics, a subject
about which scientists still know very little, and all computa-
tions yet made of the damage to be expected from atomic
radiation have been made in the absence of the one piece of
information on which all such computations need to be based,
that is to say, the spontaneous rate at which " mutations" or
permanent genetic changes occur in the absence of any abnormal
incentive.

And yet all present assessments of the harm that may be done
to posterity by careless exploitation of atomic processes, both
peaceful and warlike, are based on assessments of the "dose"
that would double this still unknown basic rate.

Radiation damage strikes, in fact, at the very basis of the
hereditary processes, and it is therefore worth while to see how
these operate.

In the broadest terms it can be said that our inherited charac-
teristics the blue eye of the father, that special ability of the
grandparent, every little variation that distinguishes us from
our fellows are passed from generation to generation in the
male and female germ cells. The same process works in other
animals and in plants. The various characteristics are recorded

215

2l6 ATOM HARVEST

as stripe-like " genes" on a number of tape-like "chromo-
somes" that vary in number from species to species. Every cell
of the body contains such chromosomes. In human beings there
are forty-eight of them, except in the germ cells, where there
are twenty-four. The full number of forty-eight is regained,
however, when male and female germ cells unite. Parents hand
on not only their own characteristics but those of their forebears.

Many of these will obviously be conflicting. The mother may
have had blue eyes and the father brown. Some characteristics
are known to be "dominant" or self-assertive and others
"recessive". Thus in a battle between blue eyes and brown
eyes, the brown, being dominant, will tend to win. But the
matter is not quite so simple as that. The effects of earlier
generations must be taken into consideration and there will
still be a chance for blue eyes to show themselves, even in the
children of brown-eyed parents. All this may seem a long call
from atom bombs and X-ray machines, but it is not, for the
chromosomes carrying the genes, or units of inheritance, are
very subject to outside interference, especially by any form of
atomic radiation. In such cases the radiation, in its passage
through the cell, either directly or indirectly does physical
damage. It may be irreparable and destroy the cell or its
ability to reproduce, or it may just damage one of the many
stripe-like genes. From then on, the cell, if it is able to reproduce
at all, will do so in the modified form. Any new characteristic
it has gained will be passed on to posterity and the newly
acquired character is known to scientists as a mutation.

The process is not a new one introduced by the atomic age.
Nature is continually producing its own mutations, so that,
to take one example of a dominant mutation, there are pro-
duced in Britain alone every year sixty-three large-headed
dwarfs from parents who show no sign of dwarfism.

Some of these normal mutations are caused by atomic radia-
tion from natural sources. One-quarter of this radiation comes
from cosmic rays that rain down on the earth from outer space ;
another quarter comes from minerals like radium in the ground;
but one-half comes from within the body itself from naturally
radioactive substances like potassium. It would appear, how-
ever, that radiation accounts for only one-tenth of all the

THE GENETIC PRICE 217

mutations that are known to occur. Just why the rest happen
it is the scientist's task to find out. Some are almost certainly
the result of chemical reaction within the cell, a process that
has been repeated in the laboratory with substances like
mustard-gas and formaldehyde.

It would be a curious thing if some of them were not simply
the result of nature's failure to duplicate exactly countless
millions of times the cells involved in the normal process.
Compared with the many genetic hazards to which nature
has herself exposed us, it would seem that the increased dangers
due to nuclear weapons up till now tested are insignificant.
Mr. Macleod, Minister of Health, told the House of Commons
of one eminent scientist who had informed him that he was "a
good deal more worried about crossing the road than he was
about the present levels of radiation".

We are faced, nevertheless, with the fact that most of the
mutations so caused are harmful and that in a welfare state we
no longer enjoy nature's own safeguard, the law of survival
of only the fittest. It is generally assumed that artificial increase
in the natural mutation rate would be damaging to the race
and that to double it would be a very bad thing. The difficulty
is in assessing either of these amounts.

Mr. Macleod, in addressing the House of Commons on
this subject in March 1955, said that " estimates of the dose of
radiation over a generation that is likely to double the spon-
taneous mutation rate varied from 3 rontgen units to 300".
A figure of 50 r over twenty-five years, he said, was "as good
a guess as we could make".

The figure of twenty-five years is taken here because it is the
average age at which we reproduce. The fact that the dose figure
should be a global one emphasises one thing that has been as-
certained about radiation damage, which is that it is cumulative.

It appears that there is no "tolerance" dose for genetics.
Any exposure at all will result in the production of mutations.
There seems to be no recovery from such damage, as there is
when other cells of the body are subjected to moderate doses of
radiation. It thus becomes imperative to discover the "rate"
at which such mutations are produced, that is to say, the re-
lationship between the amount of radiation received and the

2l8 ATOM HARVEST

damage done. Much effort has already been devoted to the
objective. A great deal of work has been done in their field in
the United States and also in Sweden.

It has been hampered by a number of factors. First of these
is the impossibility of conducting any experiments on man him-
self. As Professor Kenneth Mather of Birmingham University,
a well-known geneticist, has pointed out, many of the changes
are "recessive" and may not show themselves for twenty
generations or more, so that, apart from any ethical considera-
tion, an experiment started at the time of William the Con-
queror might only now begin to show results, and none that
we started ourselves would ever be of use to us.

Another good reason is a purely statistical one. To be of
value any such experiment must take in vast numbers of sub-
jects, all of which must be reared in strictly controlled circum-
stances.

When we start looking for a subject that will meet these con-
ditions of ready availability, rapid reproduction and economic
size, we find ourselves being driven to experiment with mice,
with insects as far removed from man as the fruit-fly, Drosophila,
and with runner-beans. Such derived data can only be applied
to man conditionally, but it is fairly argued that in many
respects, since the general mechanisms of reproduction are the
same, that if a certain behaviour is found to operate over widely
different species of the animal kingdom it may equally well
apply to man too.

The need for research into the biological effects of atomic
radiation became obvious soon after the discovery of X-rays
and of natural radioactivity at the end of the last century.
Although the question of long-term genetic effect had not then
arisen, it was soon realised that these rays could cause serious
damage to human beings, and there were many reports of ill
effects among those who used these phenomena for diagnosis or
treatment of disease and in industry. Hospital workers and
scientists suffered skin burns and other more serious injuries in
the form of tumours. The painters of luminous watch-dials who
had the habit of " sharpening" their brushes, contaminated
with radium, on the tips of their tongues paid heavily for man's
ignorance.

THE GENETIC PRICE 2IQ

Obvious lessons were soon learned from this experience and
precautions were introduced wherever possible to protect the
bodies of operators. Great care was taken to avoid ingestion
into the body through the mouth or nose of any contaminated
material. It was only when war-time research brought atomic
physics to the point where it could be exploited on a large
scale that the problem of protection assumed one of major
importance.

One reason was that it became obvious that any risks would
no longer be restricted to a small fraction of the population, and,
the larger the fraction of population involved, the larger would
be the probability of recessive or hidden damage showing itself
through marriages between couples who had suffered similar
damage.

The most important source of man-made radioactive con-
tamination in the world at present is the hydrogen bomb,
which is capable of producing and spreading anything up to at
least 1,000 times more radioactive material than an ordinary
atomic bomb. It is important, however, to distinguish between
its indiscriminate use in war over populated areas, which would
be disastrous, and the occasional testing of a weapon in the
national interest over some unpopulated corner of the Pacific
or over what may possibly prove to be the best testing ground
of all, the Antarctic.

Contamination of the atmosphere over Britain due to weapons
tests elsewhere is monitored by aeroplanes which make regular
flights at high altitudes, carrying filters which concentrate air-
borne dust. Measurements of rainwater with sensitive counters
enable calculations to be made of radioactivity reaching the
ground. These measurements all indicate that in the case of
hydrogen bomb explosions the level of intensity in the strato-
sphere 40,000 to 50,000 feet up is far greater than that at ground-
level. They suggest that the dose which will ultimately have
been received in this country by unprotected people from fall-
out that has already occurred is about o-oi rontgen units, and
that they may expect to receive a further 0-02 rontgen units
from debris that is still airborne but will ultimately settle. This
total of o 03 rontgen is one-third of that which the average
American, who is closer to the testing ground, may expect.

22O ATOM HARVEST

This figure is obviously an exaggerated one because it
assumes first of all that none of the activity, having once fallen
with rain, will be washed away and become diffused in the
ground. Secondly, it applies only to a person spending the
whole of his life, night and day, out of doors. Were he instead
to spend it all in a normal brick house the dose would be
reduced to one-twentieth.

Acting on the fairer assumption that a person spends about
half his time out of doors, but again ignoring the fact that much
of the activity would inevitably be washed away by subsequent
rain, one arrives at an average figure of o 003 rontgen units
over a generation. This would be something like 1,000 times
less than one might expect to receive from natural sources and
nearly 2,000 times less than the dose that a Tibetan, living in
an area where cosmic ray bombardment is more intense, might
expect to receive without suffering any obvious ill effects.

Other harmful effects of hydrogen bomb test explosions have
been alleged. M. Charles Noel-Martin, for example, in a com-
munication to the French Academy of Sciences, made under
the sponsorship of Prince Louis de Broglie, one of France's
leading physicists, suggested that a hydrogen bomb 1,000 times
as powerful as the atomic bomb which exploded over Hiro-
shima would result in the formation of 500,000 tons of nitrous-
oxide gas, leading to the production of nitric acid and a harmful
increase in the acidity of rainwater.

Enough radioactive carbon 14, he said, might be produced
by interaction of neutrons with atmospheric nitrogen to in-
crease the natural radio-carbon content of the air by from 10
to 30 per cent. He further stated that a ground explosion of the
same magnitude could lift up into the atmosphere 1,000 million
tons of matter and that this would appreciably diminish the
transmission of solar radiation.

These suggestions, which received a great deal of publicity
at the time, have been answered by Sir John Cockcroft.
Unites States figures for the production of nitric acid, he points
out, suggest that M. Noel-Martin's figure is about ten times too
high and that the real amount, about 50,000 tons, is unlikely
to be important since it is about the same as that produced each
day by thunderstorms.

THE GENETIC PRICE 221

Calculations made at Harwell of the radio-carbon situation
suggest that an unduly pessimistic view has been taken here too.
It is true that the amount produced might be equal in activity
at first to 670 Ib of pure radium, but that this would rise rapidly
into the atmosphere and only diffuse slowly downwards. It
would then represent one-thousandth of the amount naturally
present in the atmosphere due to cosmic rays. Since carbon 14
contributes only i per cent of all the radiation received by the
human body from natural sources, the effect is likely to be
negligible.

On M. Noel-Martin's third point, the masking effect that
explosion debris might have on the sun's rays, Sir John points
out that the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883 caused
a diminution of 10 per cent in the intensity of sunlight reaching
the earth's surface. The amount of dust thrown up into the air
on that occasion was variously estimated at between 100 million
tons and a figure 200 times higher. Records show that this great
amount of dust had no apparent effect upon the weather. If
British figures are correct, then the amount of matter thrown
up by a hydrogen bomb would in any case be only about one-
thirtieth of that suggested by M. Noel-Martin. Its effect would
be negligible.

The large-scale development of nuclear power obviously
creates its own problems. The reactors themselves are intense
sources of radiation and must be properly shielded. The re-
sultant "ashes", the product of uranium fission, are identical
with those produced by ordinary atomic explosions. There was
a time when even " experts" considered that the accumulation
of these products might present an almost insuperable problem.
The position has now changed to one in which these " wastes"
have found so many applications in hospitals, research and
industry, that the demand for them has outstripped the supply.

The wastes from Harwell are small in quantity compared
with those of a production factory like Windscale but the prob-
lem of handling them is typical. The man responsible for this
task, Mr. R. H. Burns, the son of a chartered accountant, was
born at St. Bees, within a stone's throw of the Cumberland
plant. He graduated from university with first class honours in
chemistry in 1926, and after a period of five years with a firm

222 ATOM HARVEST

of consulting metallurgists, joined the chemical branch of the
L.C.C., dealing with water-pollution, sewerage and the like.
He had a wide experience of the problem by the time he joined
the Harwell establishment in 1948.

"There are two distinct problems as far as atomic energy
establishments are concerned", he told me. "The first and
easiest is that presented by factories like Windscale, situated
near the sea. The second is that of the inland sites such as
Harwell, Aldermaston and, to a lesser extent, Springfields,
where the restrictions are much worse and more difficult than
those of sea sites." Every major action, he told me, had to
receive prior authority from the Ministry of Housing and Local
Government and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.
"They must authorise all effluent disposal in principle. They
are empowered to and do set limits on the amounts of activity
that we discharge during any given period. Both may appoint
Radiochemical Inspectors, and the Ministry of Housing and
Local Government have the right to enter any establishment
of the Authority to see that authorisations are not exceeded.

"The law requires the Authority to take such samples, to keep
such records, as the Minister requires, and when requested to
keep duplicates for them to check on. We keep a sample of
every local discharge we make into the Thames. We use the
batch basis. This gives us better control and we can sample and
check everything before we let it go, so that there is not the
slightest chance of undue activity reaching the river."

A Ministry of Housing and Local Government Inspector
actually has his own office in the effluent laboratory at Harwell.
He has the legal right to go into the establishment whenever he
wishes to see that the regulations are being complied with. The
restrictions are readily accepted by Harwell scientists. "After
all," Burns points out, "the Thames is the drinking-water
supply of London."

The Harwell establishment discharges between 300,000 and
400,000 gallons of effluent into the Thames each day. The
activity is extremely low, however, and based on the assump-
tion that reservoir inlets are nearby, whereas they are in fact
some thirty miles further down the river. Burns told me it cost
about five shillings per 1,000 gallons to handle effluent. "I was

THE GENETIC PRICE 223

staggered the other day", he said, "to learn that one well-
known chemical firm spends four times that amount on treating
some of its more difficult wastes. They did not seem to regard
their figures as excessive." The proof of their effectiveness
would seem to lie in the fact that the Metropolitan Water Board
have never yet detected any unusual activity in their reservoir
intakes.

The present view of the Authority is that the disposal of
effluent in the future will not be nearly as difficult as had
previously been anticipated. Apart from radioactive gases like
radiokrypton and radioxenon, which are at present allowed to
escape but may later be bottled and put to useful purpose,
radioactive wastes fall into three main groups, only one of
which presents any serious problem.

The first of these contains substances that are only slightly
radioactive. They are comparable to naturally radioactive
elements of the earth's crust. These present no problem. The
second group are those fission products which have half-lives
of one year or less. If nothing else can be done with them
storage for a period of about ten years is feasible and would
reduce their activity to a level where dispersal would be prac-
ticable and completely safe.

The third group is one which, on the face of it, presents most
difficulty. It consists essentially of two elements, strontium 90,
with a half-life of twenty years, and caesium 137, with a half-
life of thirty-three years. The chemical separation of these
elements is, however, a relatively easy task and they are finding
an increasing use in industry and medicine. It is expected that
for a considerable future period these two substances will be a
valuable by-product of atomic energy processes that will be
saleable at a profit. Dr. Seligman of Harwell believes, in fact,
that it would be possible to sell at once all the radioactive
wastes of this sort that are likely to be available from British
atomic power stations over the next 10 years.

If at any time the supply should begin to exceed consumer
demands the normal method of storage applied to short-lived
elements would obviously be uneconomical since the time re-
quired would be from 200 to 300 years. There is, however, a
further possibility which has emerged from recent research and

224 ATOM HARVEST

which demonstrates the lively and effective way in which
science is dealing with some of its problems.

Experiments have shown that these two potentially trouble-
some elements are readily absorbed by natural clays and that
when these are later baked a glasslike substance is produced in
which the radioactive particles of strontium and caesium are
permanently attached to the particles of clay in a manner so
effective that not even powerful chemicals like nitric acid with
a strong affinity for strontium will remove them.

Hospitals, of course, are a source of radioactive waste that
must not be forgotten, and there are the most stringent regula-
tions governing the amounts that they release. At the present
stage, however, when the total amounts used are still relatively
small, one of the easiest general ways of supervision is the purely
administrative method of totting up the total amount of radio-
active material received from places like Harwell by all the
hospitals in a given area. The water board official need not
worry too much so long as he knows that even if all the isotopes
in the area were discharged into the drains at once they could
cause no damage. In essence the problem of the hospital is a
simple one of disposing of liquid wastes, including excreta and
laboratory and laundry water, and the solid-waste problem,
including that of all kinds of paper, swabs, dressings, instru-
ments, glassware and contaminated linoleum and woodwork,
and sometimes even bed-linen and clothing.

It is obviously a good thing if as much of this waste as possible
can be disposed of without pretreatment by normal utilities or
if the amount of treatment and storage can be kept to a mini-
mum. As far as the public is concerned, the chief dangers are
those of contamination of sewers and, through them, of public
water-supplies, which might in certain circumstances suffer if
sewage that had become radioactive were incorporated in a
chemical fertiliser. There is also the problem of sewerage
workers and of workers in garbage dumps. The problem of
handling contaminated laundry is obviously a very difficult one.
If costs are to be kept down in hospitals then every effort must
be made to deal with them in the normal fashion. But very
active clothing or bed-linen will need to be given a preliminary
wash under controlled conditions.

THE GENETIC PRICE 225

It is worth remembering too that atomic bombs and reactors
are not the only man-made sources of radiation to which we
are subjected. In America, for example, where the dosage due
to atomic explosions is higher than elsewhere, the average
amount of radiation likely to be received per head from all
atomic and hydrogen bomb explosions to date is o i rontgen
unit, or only one-tenth of that which a person might receive
from a single mass-radiography chest examination.

There are many doctors who are concerned about the wide-
spread use of shoe X-rays. "It is not the single examination of
a pair of shoes that matters so much", one of them told me, "as
the fact that many mothers may take their children into two
or three shops and have them try on a number of shoes in
each and repeat this procedure several times a year. I would be
very unhappy to think that any child of mine were subjected
to it."

[ 22 ]

Bombs and the Weather

MANY queer letters reach the desk of the science correspondent
of a national newspaper. Some of them are from obvious cranks,
but the majority of them are from perfectly normal, seriously-
minded members of the public who cannot help being per-
turbed by the bewildering succession of events in the world of
science. Many of them concern flying saucers and unusual
phenomena seen in the sky, more worldly matters like atmo-
spheric pollution, the shortage of scientific manpower or the
use of preservatives in food, but a large proportion of all letters
concern atomic energy in one way or another.

They contain such questions as " Can H-bombs set fire to the
sea?", or about the effect of these major explosions on the
weather. Some writers, echoing the statements of Prof. Soddy,
express preoccupation at the amount of radioactive gas dis-
charged into the atmosphere by atomic factories, while others
are worried about plans to dump such material in the sea or in
disused mine-shafts.

On the matter of H-bombs and their effect on the weather, I
have found that there are few scientists who will give an out-
right " No". The best one can get them to say is that "We know
of no way in which it could do so".

They usually base this answer chiefly on a factor that is
constantly in the back of the mind of every physicist, the ques-
tion of energy. Like everything else in this world the behaviour
of the weather depends on the expenditure of energy. Every-
thing connected with our life on earth, we might say, depends
on energy, and that energy is all derived in one way or another

226

BOMBS AND THE WEATHER 22?

from the sun. It does not matter whether we are thinking of
something obvious, like sunshine itself, or something more re-
motely connected with the sun, like the coal we burn in our
fires, or the petrol we use in motor-cars, which has been derived
indirectly from the sun through the process of photosynthesis,
or chemical combination brought about by the action of light.

Even the rain which waters our crops and provides reserves
of hydro-electric power has been evaporated from the sea or the
face of the earth by heat from the sun. We may release some of
it by what is known as "trigger action" by providing tiny
particles of dust, crystals or even droplets of water on which
cloud-borne moisture can form larger droplets heavy enough
to fall to earth. This is, in fact, achieved by makers of " artificial
rain" when they drop seeding particles from high-flying aero-
planes, spray water underneath clouds where it will be caught
in the up-draught, or send up rockets full of tiny crystals or dis-
charge similar chemical substances by burning smoke candles
on the ground. It is also achieved by atomic bombs on a purely
local scale when they scatter soil or explosion debris or lift
water. The effect here, however, will be purely local and tem-
porary. To have a lasting effect the bombs would need to lift
enough water to replace the rain that fell or provide small
particles in quantities vastly in excess of anything they actually
achieve.

The forces released by an atomic bomb are puny compared
with those of nature. The energy provided by the explosion of
a single uranium or plutonium bomb amounts to less than that
provided by the sun each day over each square mile of the
earth's surface. An average thunderstorm would involve ener-
gies equivalent to those of several hundred such bombs, while
a hurricane would equal many thousands.

In the same way the trigger action can only be achieved
where there is an adequate supply of particles to bring about
condensation. In many parts of the globe there is in any case a
superabundance of them already, due to particles of salt and
the like.

The whole matter was summed up by Sir Graham Sutton,
the director of the Meteorological Office, in the scientific
journal Nature on February 19, 1955. After summarising the

228 ATOM HARVEST

available data he concluded that the testing of hydrogen bombs
in the Pacific the previous year "cannot be held responsible for
any world-wide extremes of weather".

There were two possible ways, he wrote, in which a thermo-
nuclear explosion might affect the weather a direct distur-
bance of pressure distribution and air-currents caused by the
shock of the explosion, or by the distribution of large quantities
of dust.

"The energy released in what is thought to have been the
most violent explosion to date is equivalent to the addition of
one rather small depression to the atmosphere ... so that
those who seek support for the theory that the effects of the
explosion were felt all over the world in increased cyclonic
activity, lasting for many months, are faced with a difficult
task."

The question of dust, said Sir Graham, was more complex
because the amount thrown up into the atmosphere by the ex-
plosions was not known nor was it known for certain whether
an increase of dust in the air would affect rainfall or tempera-
ture. The explosive eruption of Mt. Krakatoa, he recalls, prob-
ably threw up very much more dust than the Pacific bomb
explosion, but "there is no evidence of abnormal weather in
England following this eruption, although the optical effects
of the dust were evident all over the world".

The suggestion that an atomic bomb or an H-bomb might
get "out-of-control" and set the world on fire has been ade-
quately dealt with by Prof. Frisch in a broadcast made in 1954
at a period of great public alarm after the President of the
United States had reported that the explosion of the hydrogen
bomb at Bikini on March i that year had been "much more
powerful than was expected". Radioactive ashes had fallen on
people and caused radiation injuries at distances of 100 miles
or so, a distance that until then had been considered safe.

He recalled uncertainties among the scientists . themselves
when he and others nine years before awaited the explosion of
the world's very first atomic bomb at Alamagordo in the deserts
of New Mexico. Some, says Prof. Frisch, thought they might get
hurt in their observation post twenty miles away. Others did
not believe it would work at all. In the end it all happened just

BOMBS AND THE WEATHER

as the theoretical physicists had predicted. They achieved this
although the atomic bomb, at the moment of explosion, was
"many thousand times hotter than the hottest furnace". They
had to calculate the behaviour of that exceedingly hot mass of
gas by stretching their scientific imagination far beyond the
range of any previous experiments.

In the case of the hydrogen bomb, explained Prof. Frisch,
the rate at which the explosion develops depends very much on
temperature, so that any slight error in predicting the tempera-
ture could mean a big error in predicting explosive effect. A
slight variation in the efficiency of the detonator might cause
the violence of the whole explosion to vary a great deal. "But
there is one thing no bomb can do: it cannot produce more
energy than is contained in the explosive."

Reports that scientists were startled by the violence of the
explosion could only mean that the previous test had produced
only a fraction of the available energy and that the more recent
one had unexpectedly produced a larger fraction. Scientists
might not be able to predict that sort of variation but they
can predict the maximum explosive effect with complete confi-
dence. "If an eye-witness said it looked 'as if the explosion had
got out of control', that was purely a figure of speech. The ex-
plosion cannot get out of control", said Frisch. "There is no
possibility that the earth, the sea or the atmosphere could catch
fire as it were. The explosion cannot spread to common
materials."

One of the most vexed questions of atomic energy has been
concerned with the disposal of certain solid waste matter that
could not be dealt with by normal methods of storage and
eventual dispersion. Within this category come a variety of
laboratory instruments that have become contaminated with
radioactive materials of long half-life.

The normal procedure here, a very expensive one, is that of
sea-dumping. Several times a year one of the Royal Fleet
Auxiliaries makes a journey several hundred miles out to sea to
dump a number of concrete-covered metal canisters into the
deep water beyond what is known as the "Continental Shelf"
where the canisters are undoubtedly safe for as long a time as
their contents will remain active.

23O ATOM HARVEST

Much of this waste matter comes from the Atomic Energy
Research Establishment at Harwell, Berks, and the suggestion
was made some years ago that it would be quite safe and much
more in the taxpayer's interest to dump these canisters in one
of the many disused mine-shafts of the Forest of Dean, not
many miles from the establishment.

The suggestion, a perfectly sound one, was opposed by a
group, known as the Free Miners, with ancient rights in the
forest. There could be no sound scientific basis for their atti-
tude. The mines were disused and, even if mining were for any
reason restarted in nearby parts of the forest, there could be no
risk of a spread of contamination to nearby workings.

No-one expects the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean to be
scientists, nor was it incumbent on them, who had nothing to
gain, to seek scientific advice at their own expense. There are,
however, fully qualified scientists outside the Atomic Energy
Authority who are employed by the Ministry of Housing and
Local Government and who are specifically charged by law
with the protection of the public against harmful practices of
this sort.

A far more enlightened attitude was adopted by the people
of the little town of Thurso on the north-east tip of Scotland
when they were consulted about the establishment of an atomic
reactor of a new and revolutionary type, the Dounreay breeder
reactor, several miles from the town. Led by their Provost, a
senior official in the Salvation Army, they welcomed the pro-
ject and the small element of risk which they had been told
went with it. Their action will undoubtedly lead to Thurso
becoming one of the leading centres of the North.

The Way Ahead

IN TEN years atomic energy has grown to be one of Britain's
largest and most important industries. The United Kingdom
Atomic Energy Authority has ten different establishments and
a payroll of 20,000, compared with a modest 6,000 employed
by its transatlantic counterpart, the United States Atomic
Energy Commission.

The comparison, of course, is not a fair one and the American
project is many times bigger than our own. The difference lies
in the way the U.S.A.E.C. has enlisted private industry and the
universities to do its work, both in the research and develop-
ment fields and also in the operation of plant. If contractors
were counted in, the labour force would be nearer to 120,000.

In Britain, instead, until quite recently, very little develop-
ment work has been done by private industry and all factories
are still operated by what was, until December 31, 1953, th e
Atomic Energy Division of the Ministry of Supply and which
is now the U.K.A.E.A.

The situation is now rapidly changing. The U.K.A.E.A. is
retaining its role of a pioneering organisation feeding firms with
the data they need, and also remaining responsible for the
manufacture of atomic explosive and weapons, but the design-
ing and building of civil power stations is being left to the
Central Electricity Authority and to private firms. The responsi-
bility for running these stations will be C.E.A.'s.

The various groups of the Atomic Energy Authority work
closely together. In much the same way that a private firm
might operate, the directors of the various groups meet every

231

232 ATOM HARVEST

alternate Thursday under Sir Edwin Plowden for a "board
meeting", Sir John Cockcroft representing research activities,
Sir Christopher Hinton from the Production and Industrial
side, Sir William Penney from the Weapons Group, and Sir
Donald Perrott in charge of administration and finance.

One of the main tasks of the Authority since it took over from
the Ministry of Supply has been to try and get private industry
interested. They have had signal success. There are now nearly
two hundred firms engaged in the manufacture of atomic energy
equipment and the number is likely to increase rapidly as other
companies realise the tremendous opportunities that the future
holds in store.

The building of a nuclear power station, of course, is a big
job. It may cost anything from 10 million to 20 million and
involves many different trades and professions. There is nuclear
and electronic equipment, the trickiest of all, of course, and
heat-exchange plant required for steam-raising, turbines and
dynamos, and the structural work itself, which involves many
problems not met with in a conventional power station. It is
not the sort of job that any small company could tackle and no
big one of the pre-atomic era could hope to do it on its own. In
Britain, as in the United States, the right answer has been
achieved by the formation of groups of companies, each made
up of firms specialising in the different component fields.

There are in Britain already four such groups of companies,
each trained and equipped to design and construct, and, if
necessary, to operate, nuclear power stations in any part of the
world. Many of these member companies have already gained
experience in building one or other of the existing U.K.A.E.A.
facilities and all of them are currently engaged on much larger
contracts in connection with the new programme of nuclear
power.

All this work will provide them with ample experience to
take on export orders. Apart from the various research reactors
and the adventurous experimental power project of advanced
design now under way at Dounreay in the North of Scotland,
there are no less than fifteen large-scale industrial nuclear
power stations scheduled for construction at present that will
derive their power from twenty-two atomic reactors. The know-

THE WAY AHEAD 233

how they gain in this work is going to pay dividends in the
future.

The speed with which things are happening in the atomic
energy industry has surprised even the men most intimately con-
nected with it. The " Programme of Nuclear Power" announced
by the Government in February 1955, which involved the build-
ing of twelve atomic power stations costing 300 million over an
initial ten-year period, represented, we were told at the time,
the most that industry could possibly hope to cope with, having
regard to the country's resources and other calls that had to be
met. Yet only four months later the U.K.A.E.A. announced its
decision to go ahead with the construction of a further three
power stations of its own, involving six more reactors of the
Calder Hall type. The production of more military explosive
is their main object. The substantial contribution they will
make to the country's electricity supplies is secondary but im-
portant. They will incorporate few new ideas, it is true, but the
fact that they are likely to be finished by 1961, thus almost
doubling construction over that period, shows how industry is
bending to the new tasks.

Sir Edwin Plowden, who heads the Authority, is a curiously
undramatic man, shy and modest but with a tremendous sense
of purpose and a sure knowledge of the importance of the task.
Born in Argyll in 1907, he is well and away the youngest mem-
ber of the Atomic Energy Board, and, having come from out-
side, is still a little diffident at first when he talks on the subject.
His father was a Scottish "country gentleman". His mother is
an American, the daughter of W. S. Haseltine, the painter. He
went to schools in Switzerland and in England, saw a bit of
America, and then came back to take an economics degree at
Cambridge. Unlike so many of the men he now has under him,
Plowden took things pretty easily, describing himself as an
"average idle undergraduate".

After a short spell on the sales side of a firm manufacturing
telephone equipment, Plowden joined C. Tennant and Sons, a
London chemical firm, in 1931. It was a time when business
everywhere was bad and competition was sharp. Still on the
sales side, he was up against old and experienced competitors,
but his shy frankness made up for other people's self-confidence

234 ATOM HARVEST

and glib sales talk. Within seven years, and still only thirty-one,
he was made a director of the firm.

When war broke out, Plowden went first to the Ministry of
Economic Warfare and then to the Ministry of Aircraft Pro-
duction, where he shot straight to the top and finished up as
chief executive. The war ended, he returned to Tennant's, but
he had only been there a year when he was asked to join the
Treasury and help to plan the country out of the welter of post-
war economic difficulties. He was called Chief Planning Officer
and worked in close contact with Sir Stafford Cripps, first in
getting the country onto a peace-time footing and then in the
equally difficult task of rearming again on a major scale without
provoking a new crisis. Always he worked with tactful efficiency
and showed a knack of getting his own way with a minimum of
fuss.

Plowden is not a man for the limelight, and when his chair-
manship of the Atomic Energy Authority was announced he
managed to avoid a public appearance for a whole year on the
excuse that it was " people like Cockcroft, Hinton and Penney
that matter most".

Plowden has his office on the eighth floor in St. Giles Court,
an imposing new block of offices built for the Ministry of Supply
just off Holborn. The whole of the floor has been loaned to the
A.E.A. until their own headquarters is ready on the site of the
old Junior Carlton Club in Great Charles Street. Workers in
the building and members of the Ministry of Supply employed
in London can enter by showing a pass to a uniformed War
Department policeman at the door, but most other visitors, even
if they are Atomic Energy men from Harwell or Risley, are
motioned to a long reception desk where they have to fill in a
pass with their name, nationality, and office and home addresses.
They must wait while the letters A/E, for Atomic Energy, are
impressed across the pass with a rubber stamp and a messenger
is called to take them up in the lift.

For those unused to Atomic Energy procedure the wire cage
that meets them as the lift doors open at the eighth floor is a bit
of a surprise. It is designed to make all file past the guard-post
singly as they enter or leave the floor.

I had gone to St. Giles Court to see the Chairman and, after

THE WAY AHEAD 235

a further stamp on my pass upstairs to indicate that I had been
checked into the precincts, I was shown along to the "Press
Office". Here Stanley White, a cheery, round-faced and much
over-worked ex-R.A.F. officer who has had the difficult task
of keeping newspapers happy almost since the war, was busy
taking in turn a continuous stream of incoming calls on two
telephones. As he put one down to answer a waiting caller on
the other, the first one rang again. And so it would go on for
the rest of the day.

White took me along to the Chairman's office and discreetly
retired. Plowden, a dapper, clean-shaven man with inquiring,
friendly eyes, got up and shook hands and motioned me to a
seat. He looked a very prim and proper business man, tidy and
precise and obviously a little shy.

When I asked him to talk about his job he took refuge at first
in published statements and reports, quoting from official
papers. "I believe what was said in the White Paper", he told
me, referring to the Programme of Nuclear Power and avoiding
any expression of personal views. Then, slowly at first, he began
to warm to his subject. " Atomic energy already affects, and
will affect more and more, every phase of our national life", he
said. "It matters to this country enormously, both in defence
and in the economic field.

" It has come first in Britain, not because we are cleverer than
anyone else, but because it is an industrial country with the
most immediate need. It is economic here quicker than it
would be in any other place." Because Britain could, with its
lower capital costs, build atomic reactors more cheaply than
they could be built, for example, in America, they were bound
to be economic here more quickly.

"There is another thing", he went on. "It is a very obvious
one. The whole of our existence in Britain is based on the as-
sumption that we are at the centre of a political and economic
nexus. In the past our influence has been based on political and
military power. More and more, now, it has got to be based on
a strong economy and on what people think is going on here
and whether we seem a live lot with new ideas. If we demon-
strate that we are, then people are going to want to come and
work with us and that is going to bring all sorts of advantages.

236 ATOM HARVEST

They will say we are pretty good people to collaborate with.
'Let us remain close to them and trade with them'."

The results of progress in the atomic energy field were already
being felt, he told me. A great number of approaches to Britain
had already been made. "People want to work with us and we
feel that we can help them."

Sir Edwin is not sure at this stage just how an export business
could work. "The Authority itself will not be in the market",
he told me. "That side of it is going to be up to industry. We
shall feed them with the data they need. It looks at present as
though British companies will then design and build complete
units where needed for other countries and the Authority will
supply the fuel elements and be responsible for processing them
again afterwards."

Plowden told me that as far as British firms are concerned
the interest they were now showing in atomic energy matters
was tremendous and quite embarrassing. The difficulty was
that so many people were all at once waking up to the fact that
there was something in it and wanting to know about it. After
a long period in which very little interest had been shown they
were now all saying: "This is a new thing. We are all entitled
to know about it. You must put us in a position where we can
take part." The difficulty was to organise the passing on of
information to those who needed it.

"They come to us and tell us they want someone from the
firm to 'know about atomic energy' and ask us if so-and-so
could work as a member of our staff. Many of them have been
given these facilities, but there are far more requests of this sort
than we can possibly cope with. There is first the security prob-
lem and then the physical task of how to get the information
over. It was to simplify matters that we asked industry to form
four groups of companies which would then work in close col-
laboration with us, and we have had to stick resolutely to this
arrangement, except in cases where we have firms working with
us on individual projects."

I asked Plowden about other applications, such as ships, and
he told me they were doing something there both for the
Admiralty and for shipbuilders, but there were many problems
connected with this application of nuclear power apart from

THE WAY AHEAD 237

the shielding. "The main point here 35 , he told me, "is that,
whereas with ships the time is still some way off before nuclear
propulsion can become a commercial proposition, the use of it
in large industrial central stations is commercial already."

Plowden is essentially an economist and an administrator
and he prefers not to be drawn into discussion on scientific
matters. That field is the realm of Sir John Cockcroft, and the
simple, concise and friendly way in which he can discuss these
matters with anyone from the Prime Minister down to a school-
boy has had much to do with the speed with which the atomic
energy project was able to gain funds and grow in the difficult
post-war years when there were many great hopes to offer but
few firm promises.

Like so many of the really great scientists, Cockcroft had the
knack of saying what he wanted to say in the simplest possible
language, and, being an engineer as well as a mathematician
and physicist, he knew how to win over the men who were
really going to count more than anybody, the Hintons, Owens
and Kendalls, when it came to putting scientific theories into
bricks and mortar, graphite and steel.

John Cockcroft was born in 1897, one of five sons of a Tod-
morden cotton manufacturer. Three brothers went into the
family business, but John won a scholarship to Manchester
University from the local secondary school and did engineering.
When the First World War broke out before his studies were
completed he was still too young to join a combatant unit and
worked with the Young Men's Christian Association until he
was old enough to be accepted by the Royal Field Artillery. In
the improvident way in which Britain in those days squandered
its best brains on the field of battle, she went near to losing,
unknown, the man who was destined to build the world's first
atom-splitting machine, play a leading part in the development
of radar in the Second World War and, afterwards, became
chief scientific adviser on defence to the Cabinet.

As it was, Cockcroft was able to return to Manchester and
complete his engineering studies before taking a job with
Metropolitan- Vickers. In 1923 he left Manchester for St. John's
College, Cambridge, and soon gained the highest honours in the
Mathematics Tripos. All that time he was working as a research

238 ATOM HARVEST

student under Lord Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory
and in 1928 he was elected a fellow of his college. His big day
came in 1932 when, with his fellow worker, E. T. S. Walton,
he used a home-made device of ingenious but rude construc-
tion to split the atom for the first time by purely artificial
means.

Rutherford, it will be remembered, had already shown that
the source of atomic energy lay in the minute, positively-
charged core of the atom, the nucleus. Using rays emitted by
certain unstable nuclei, he had succeeded in disrupting others,
but it was a slow business and very limited in its applica-
tions. The engine of Cockcroft and Walton, which was to set a
new fashion, speeded up this process enormously and opened
up new fields. It paved the way to the giant atom-smashing
machines of the mid-century, which have jumped in size from
the table-top variety to something weighing thousands of tons
and costing millions of pounds.

John Cockcroft was as excited at the time as any schoolboy
on catching his first pike. He didn't know how to contain his
emotions (and probably did not want to) . He went rushing out
into King's Parade, the busy, college-lined street that forms the
focal point of the university, dancing along and stopping any-
one he knew to tell them: "We've split the atom and the
Americans have been spending millions to try and do the same
thing.' 5

Cockcroft was thirty-five at the time and has now grown
more sedate, but he still preserves much of the same youthful
spirit of adventure of the young research student. Reporters
have learned, too, that the many speeches and lectures that he
makes up and down the country to learned societies and pro-
fessional institutions almost invariably contain something new
in them, which is quite a difficult thing to achieve when anyone
has to make as many speeches as Sir John does.

A man of wide interests, he has been a keen hockey player,
is a good bat, and still likes to lead a cricket team at Harwell
on special occasions and public holidays. He has the rare ability,
too, of being able to cut himself off completely from his work
when he is at home, he tells me, and places his five children
foremost among his interests. He is keen on music, although he

THE WAY AHEAD 239

does not play himself, and loves to read, with a preference for
history, archaeology and "all sorts of politics". He likes to work
in his garden, too, but concentrates on things like strawberries
and asparagus, leaving the rest to Roger, a retired agricultural
labourer who puts in two days a week.

Cockcroft is a man of medium build with sparse, flat hair.
His wise-looking, half-closed eyes never miss anything. His
eyebrows are bushy, sharply angled and gnome-like. Although
quick on the sports-field, he normally walks in a slow and
purposeful way and his favourite attitude is to stand with hands
in his jacket pockets and thumbs resting on the tops, a habit
that inevitably ruins the shape of his suits. His conversational
manner would be perfectly in keeping with a cup of afternoon
tea in a Victorian drawing-room, and he can flit from atomic
piles or nuclear accelerators to the Test score with the same
facility that a society hostess dismisses the servant problem to
chat about a wedding that she has attended.

Dr. B. F. J. Schonland, the brilliant South African physicist
who left a professorial chair in the University of Witwatersrand
to become Cockcroft's deputy at Harwell, tells a homely story
about him. They were dining in Cape Town with friends who
had the usual irrepressible small son, who had been warned
carefully beforehand by his mother to keep silent during the
meal. Towards the end this ten-year-old suddenly electrified
the company, which had kept well away from delicate subjects.

"Sir John, may I ask you a question?" he burst out.

"Yes, certainly you may", replied Sir John.

"Well, it's about the atom bomb", said the boy, to every-
body's horror, " I don't want to know how it's made. We know
that, and we know what to put in it. What I wanted to ask is
how big it is and what you put it into''

"Well, I haven't seen one and I really don't know how big
it is", Cockcroft told him.

"Anyway, it must be small enough to be carried in an aero-
plane", said the boy, thoughtfully.

"Yes, I think it is quite small really."

"But what we want to know is, what is it packed in?"

"Well, I really don't know," replied Sir John carefully, "but
I shouldn't think it is very important."

24O ATOM HARVEST

"The metal wouldn't make any difference?" pursued the
boy.

"No, I don't think it would."

"Oh, well," replied the boy with relief, "then do you think
that something like a jam tin would do?"

"Yes," said Sir John, "I think it would do very well."

"Thank you very much indeed", said the irrepressible one.
"That is just what I wanted to know. You see, we're making
one."

* * *

It has been said of Hinton that he runs the Industrial Group
as an autocracy. That would never have worked at Harwell,
and Cockcroft would have been the last man in the world to
have wanted it so. Engineers like a target all the time, an end
in view. At Harwell there are no firm targets. There is no such
thing as perfection. The horizon is always running on ahead.
The solution of each problem merely opens up new fields to
conquer. There can be no defining those new fields until they
come into view. The result is that Harwell has become a glori-
fied university of atomic energy where individual initiative is
at a premium.

While workers in the research establishments of the Industrial
Group in the North are concentrating on the immediate prob-
lems of raising the temperature of fuel elements, preventing
corrosion and finding more efficient ways to extract heat from
reactors now being designed, such problems only provide one
facet of the work at Harwell and many lines of fundamental
work are being pursued that have no apparent bearing at all
on problems of the next ten or fifteen years.

With better fuel elements now being developed, Cockcroft
reckons that it will be possible to produce in the first British
commercial power stations heat equivalent to 10,000 tons of
coal for every ton of uranium fuel. By the time stage two is
reached in the early sixties that figure should already have been
multiplied by a factor of 10. "In the long run, if nuclear power
is to become a major source of power in the world, we should
like to see this figure multiplied ten times more again," he told
me, "so that we would be extracting from each ton of uranium

THE WAY AHEAD 24!

heat equivalent to something like a million tons of coal, thus
approaching the theoretical limit of three million if all the
uranium undergoes fission."

Breeder reactors, using a small core of almost pure fissile
material, and preferably plutonium, offered the best chance of
achieving this. The core would be surrounded with a fertile
blanket of uranium 238 or thorium 232 which would take up
surplus neutrons from the central core. Many of the neutrons
absorbed in this way would be transmuted into the new fuels,
plutonium or uranium 233, but, because escaping neutrons
would be travelling fast, a fair proportion of them would be able
to cause the normally inactive uranium 238 to undergo fission
and thus make an important contribution to the total amount of
heat produced.

Cockcroft reckons that when such processes are available there
should be no shortage of atomic fuel for the next millennium or
two.

I asked him what he thought of the chances of using the
hydrogen bomb reaction, the fusion of hydrogen atoms to form
helium as they do in the sun, as a source of useful energy on
earth. Sir John, whose work in the early thirties under Ruther-
ford was in this very sphere of fundamental research, told me
with quiet confidence: " I think everyone feels that this is going
to come off. It is something for the future, though, which we are
intensely interested in."

Cockcroft was far more confident than I had expected him
to be about the chances of producing really small "packaged
power" units. The tendency of many scientists, especially those
outside the atomic field, is to ridicule any small-scale applica-
tion. Packaged power units of the sort that the Americans were
planning to make for military purposes were certainly feasible,
he told me, as lorg as you did not mind paying between three-
pence and sixpence for a unit of electricity. "In places like
Broken Hill, in Southern Australia, where they are already
paying threepence a unit, and in other parts of the world,
where it is costing sixpence, a small unit might be well worth
while."

"What about atomic locomotives?" I queried him. They
might be possible in the future when plutonium becomes really
16

242 ATOM HARVEST

cheap, he reckoned, but although the size presented no diffi-
culty it had to be remembered that diesel traction cost only
about 0*4 penny per shaft horsepower/hour.

I asked Sir John with some diffidence about reports from the
United States of plans to build small, self-contained units, with
control rods pre-set in the factory, that could be used in any
house to run the normal central-heating and water installations.
To my surprise he did not rule them out as a long-term project.
It all depended on the availability of cheap fuel, he told me.
Small reactors using concentrated fuels without a moderator
tended to be self-adjusting. When they got too hot they tended to
switch themselves off and the reaction started again when they
began to cool down. An equilibrium was thus set up which
should make control fairly simple.

"And aeroplanes?" I queried. The Americans, he reminded
me, were developing atom-powered aircraft only for military
use. He did not think they had any civil applications, at least
in the foreseeable future. With plutonium or uranium con-
taminated with fission products, and also liquid metal coolants
around, there would be too much damage done if one of them
crashed.

Aircraft applications brought me to gas-turbines. Since it was
almost impossible to stop water from turning to steam at
temperatures of more than 370 degrees Centigrade, whatever
the pressure applied, I asked him what he thought of the chances
of using gas-turbines, which have no such temperature limita-
tion, to improve the operating efficiency of electric generating
stations.

Sir John believes that there is a great future for gas-turbines
in the atomic energy industry. "It is purely a question of time
and we have preferred to take the easy things first." This line
was taken up again by Mr. Leonard Rotherham, head of the
Industrial Group's research and development division, when I
saw him at Culcheth, near the Risley headquarters, some weeks
later.

Culcheth is one of five laboratories devoted to solving im-
mediate problems and surmounting the obstacles that crop up
in the day-to-day building and operation of plant and in the
design and execution of sanctioned new projects. Unlike

THE WAY AHEAD 243

Harwell, where so much of the effort is fundamental and
academic, work at these Northern laboratories is very much
of an applied nature. The emphasis is all the time on "knowing
how" at a particular date.

"You do a lot of broad planning in atomic energy work,"
explained Rotherham, "but you then proceed by a series of
short steps. The great thing is to design a reactor that you can
sell and that produces enough money to pay for the develop-
ment of the next stage so that you can always keep ahead of
your competitors."

I was amazed at Culcheth to note the frank and open way in
which members of the staff explained their work and discussed
their problems. They were getting ready for an "open day" on
which each member of the staff would be able to invite a friend
along to see work at the establishment. Harwell has similar
functions periodically. The Authority finds that they are in-
valuable in demonstrating to the general public that there is
really nothing very terrifying about atomic energy.

It was surprising, nevertheless, to see how much previously
secret work was on show and how ready senior staff were to
answer questions that would have been considered very in-
discreet only six months ago. The explanation, I was told by
Rotherham, was that a very genuine change had taken place
in the field. "We have entered the commercial era", he told
me frankly. "We are expanding rapidly and we want to attract
new blood. We can do that best by showing people that ours is
a fascinating but otherwise very normal job."

The shortage of scientific and engineering staff is a serious
problem. It is not preventing the execution of the present pro-
gramme, but it is certainly preventing the planners from ex-
panding in the way they would like to. Culcheth, for example,
has only 10 per cent of the middle-grade scientists that it needs
and there are ninety jobs going to the right sort of people at
salaries ranging from 300 to 3,000 a year. Most of them are
for young graduates with first or good second class degrees, who
at twenty-two years of age will get 500 or 600 and have a
good chance of earning 1,500 or more by the time they are
in their middle thirties.

Now that the main bogey of atomic energy work, the idea

244 ATOM HARVEST

that it is dangerous, has been exploded, there is still one more
thing that worries many who would otherwise be keen to enter
the new field. It is the bogey of security. The Authority offers
its employees marvellous prospects and often a house, but there
are many people in Britain who still believe that they will be
marked men once they join an atomic energy project, that their
telephone lines will be tapped, and that if they want to go
abroad they will either be prevented from doing so or followed
by secret service men wherever they go.

It would be a physical impossibility, of course, for any such
procedure to be implemented and it would require a security
force far larger than all the scientists, engineers, and industrial
staff put together. The real answer is that the great majority of
the work is now non-secret anyway and much of it is published
eventually with due credit to the workers responsible. But
every commercial organisation has its own trade secrets, and
the atomic energy business has got its own trade secrets just
like any other. The police at the gates and the security officers
inside are carrying out the same function that their counter-
parts have to carry out in a chemical works, or a factory making
some highly competitive form of electronic equipment.

The safety position could not be described more succinctly
than it was when Sir Christopher Hinton addressed the people
of Thurso about the new reactor that was to be built at Doun-
reay, just outside the town. " I am not going to claim that there
is no risk", he told them. " Every human activity involves a
certain amount of risk and we can only evaluate one by com-
paring it with another to which we are also subjected. By far
the greatest risk we run is that of dying from natural causes."
He then gave some interesting figures.

In the age groups 10 to 45, about 150 in every 100,000 die
every year. Of these, some forty die deaths of violence; they are
electrocuted in their own homes, are victims of road accidents,
fall down stairs or, possibly, commit suicide. The rest of them,
about no, die from illness or from diseases like tuberculosis,
pneumonia, malignant disease, and so on.

If a man works in one of the dangerous industries such as
quarrying or coalmining, his risk of dying prematurely is
increased by about 50 per cent. In "safe" industries like

THE WAY AHEAD 245

engineering, chemicals and electricity, the chances are only
increased by 7 per cent.

In the atomic energy industry, by contrast, in spite of the fact
that it is in its infancy and has been dealing with completely
new problems in a relatively unknown field, the corresponding
rate is only 2 per cent higher than the normal. It is therefore
three times safer than the chemical and engineering industries,
which are rightly proud of their safety records.

It is worth adding that not a single one of the deaths up to
date has been due to radioactivity, and, in fact, not a single
case of damage due to radiation has ever been recorded in
Britain since the project started.

Index

ABELSON, PROF. P. H., 58
accidents, 137, 138, 158, 163,

244. 245

Adams, G. A., Plate 10
Admiralty, work for, 236
aircraft, atom-powered, oo
aircraft carrier, atom-propelled,

*59

aircraft "guinea pigs", 180

air-lift to Emu, 179

Akers, Sir Wallace, 64,67,88, 106

Alamagordo (U.S.) test, 144, 228

Alexander, R., 173

Allibone, Dr., 79

American Atomic Energy Com-
mission, 20, 24, 49, 77, 231

Anderson, Sir John. See Lord
Waverley

Anglo-American Atomic Agree-
ment of 1955, 14

Antarctic, as site for H-bomb
test, 219

anti-aircraft role of atomic
weapons, 28, 29

antibodies, isotopes to investi-
gate, 212

Antwis, J., 112

Appleton, Sir Edward, 62

Arnold, Wing-Comdr. H., 97, 98

Argonne (U.S.) National Labor-
atory, 96

Aston, F. W., 38, 48, 171, 199,
Plate 2

Atomic Energy Act (U.S.), of

1954-14

Atomic Energy Research Estab-
lishment. See Harwell

atomic explosion effects, Plates
12, 13

Atomic Weapons Research
Establishment, 142, 181

atomic weapons, economic evalu-
ation of, 29, 30

"Atoms for Peace" Plan, 14

Auger, Prof., 92

Australia, 149-55, 175-90, 241

automation, 32, 33

autoradiography, 201, Plate 23

BACKGROUND radiation, 220

Bainbridge, Prof., 65

Bannister, H. H., Plate 16

barium, radioactive, 206

Barnes, Gorell, 74

base surge, 147

beer, radio-isotopes manufac-
ture, 209

BEPO reactor, 91, 93, 122-4,
127, 159, 160, 165, 211

beryllium as moderator, 82, 83,

158

Bikini atomic tests, 146-8, 150,

196, 197, 228
biological shield, 122, 124, 128,

137
Blackett, Prof. P. M. S., 48,

Plate 2
Bohr, Prof. Niels, 44, 45, 48, 50,

53> 79

Brabazon, Lord, 62
breeding, 162, 163, 240, 241
Bretscher, Dr. E., 40, 41, 54, 58,

65* 67, 79, 140
Briggs, Dr. Wyman J., 57
British atomic programme, an-
nounced, 1 8

247

248 INDEX

British establishments, map of, 89

bromine, radioactive, 206

Broompark, collier, 56

Burns, R. H., 221

Bush, Dr. V., 66, 67, 68, 72, 74, 75

Butler, R. A., 62

CAESIUM, radioactive, 204, 205
Calder Hall reactors, 126, 161,

162, 233
Campania, H.M.S., 150, 153, 154,

155
Canada, 68, 78, 79, 84, 122, 158

cancer, 202, 203
Cannizzaro, 198
Capenhurst atomic factory, 1 1 8,

159. 169-74
Catch, Dr. J. R., 213
Cavendish Laboratory, 42, 152,

238
Central Electricity Authority,

165, 231
Chadwick, Sir James, 48, 52, 54,

57, 64, 67, 76, 79, 140, Plate 2
chain reaction, world's first, 80
Chalk River Establishment, 79,

88,91,92,94,96, 122,204
Chenvell, Lord, 60, 61, 90
Cheshire, Gp.-Capt. C. L., 144
Churchill, Sir Winston, 17, 23,

60, 7orfj., 138, 149
Clarendon Laboratory, 152
Clementine (U.S.) reactor, 85
Clinton (U.S.) atomic labor-
atory, 95
coal reserves, 34
coal, wasteful use of, 33
cobalt, radioactive, 204, 205, 2 10
Cockcroft, Sir J., 48, 53, 57, 58,

64, 65, 88, 90, 105, 129, 161,

199, 200, 220, 221, 232, 234,

2 37> 2 39-4 2 > Plates i, 2
Cole, D. W., Plate 16
Cole, Leslie, 112
Coleman, R., 102

companies, commercial, 103,
232, 236

Conant, Dr., 72, 74, 75

Congo uranium, agreement se-
curing, 78

contamination, air monitoring
of, 219

Cook, Dr. L. G., 43

coolants, 159, 161, 163

cooling of fuel rods, 130

cooling ponds for fuel rods,
Plate 5

Cooper, Capt. Pat, 185, 186, 190

cost of atom stations, 232, 233,
235, 237, 242

C.P.i (Chicago Pile One), 80

C.P.2 (Chicago Pile Two), 80

C.P.3 (Chicago Pile Three), 81,

83

critical mass, 140, 141, 192
Culcheth atomic laboratories,

242, 243, 244
Cunningham, 161

DALE, SIR HENRY, 62

Dalton, John, 48

Davey, H. G., 135-9, 167, 168,

Plate i 6

deadline for plutonium, 124, 138
Dean, Forest of, 230
Dean, Mr. Gordon, 20, 24, 49, 50
de Broglie, Prince L., 220
detonating mechanism of atomic

weapons, 143
detonating mechanisms, 181,

192-6

detonation, laboratory, Plate 8
deuterium, 82. See also heavy

water

Diamond, Prof. J., 126
DIDO reactor, 166
Disney, H., 108, 171, 172, Plate

16
disposal of radioactive wastes,

221, 222

INDEX 249

Dixon, J., 118 "fission-fusion-fission" bomb,

dominance, genetic, 216 I 94~7

Dounreay breeder reactor, 162, fission products, 206

163, 164, 232 foodstuffs, isotopes help to mix,

Dounreay reactor, diagram, 1 64 209

Dunworth, Dr. J. V., 40, 41, 94, Fowler, Dr. R. H., 56, 65

-156

443 reactor. See DIDO
Economic Warfare, Ministry of,

234
economics of nuclear power, 168,

232, 235, 237, 242
Eden, Sir Anthony, 78
efficiency of nuclear power, 35,

36

Einstein, Prof., 38
Eisenhower, Pres., 14
electricity, rising consumption

of, 33
Emeleus, Prof. H. J., 79

Emu field test, 24, 1 75-90
energy available in uranium, 240

France, 14, 40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49,

55, 56, 57, 5 8 > 8 5
France, R. E., Plate 16
Frisch, Prof. O. R., 44, 45, 48,

50,52,53,54,67,79, '40, 141*

228, 229

Fuchs, Dr. K., 98, 140
fuel elements, development of,

100, 101

GAS turbines, future for, 242
genetic damage, mechanism of,

216

genetic effects, 215-25
Geneva Conference on Peaceful

Uses of Atomic Energy, 14,

163

Ginns, D., 112, 113, 125
GLEEP reactor, 157, 159, 165

energy in storms, 227, 228

enriched fuel, 159

European scientists, contribution gold, radioactive, 206, 209

of, 49 Goodlet, B. L., 160

Evans-Lombe,Vice-Adml. E.N., graphite moderator, 123, 158

149 Grove, Dr. W. P., 211

explosion effects, 189 Groves, Brig.-Gen. L. R., 68, 74

FAIR, D., 167

Farthing, J., 112
fast reactors, 162
Feather, Prof. N., 54, 56, 58, 64,

65,67

Penning, Dr. F., 56, 92, 94
Fermi, Enrico, 39, 81, 85, 157
filters in Windscale chimneys, 129
Finniston, Dr. H. M., 99, 100,

101, no

Fishenden, Dr. M., 97, 98, 99
fission, atomic, 38 et seq., 81
fission, diagram of, 41

HAFSTAD, DR., 29, 30

Hahn, Prof. O., 40, 43, 45, 48, 50

Halban, Prof., 4.6, 55, 64, 67, 68

half-life, 203, 205

Hanford (U.S.) atomic factory,

19, 81, 113, 125, 126
Hankey, Lord, 62
Hanstein, Dr. H. B., 46, 84
Harlequin, 92
Hart, R., 112
Harwell, QQetseq., 105, 124, 156,

163, 204, 211, 221, 238, 240
Haseltine, W. S., 233

250 INDEX

Haworth, Prof. R. D., 54
H-bomb, 22-31, 194-7
H-bomb, British decision to

make, 18, 24

headquarters of U.K.A.E.A., 234
heat-exchangers, 161, 163
heavy water as moderator, 82 et

seq. y 158
heavy water, occurrence and

manufacture of, 82
"hex" (uranium hexafluoride),

58,64, 170, 171
Hillen, Betty, 91
Hines, S. F., 173, 174, Plate 16
Hinton, Sir C., 105-7, U 3> I! 4>

116-21, 124, 136, 161, 162,

232, 234, 240, 244, Plate 1 6
Hinton, Lady, 119-21
Hiroshima, 144, 147
Holland, 86

Hopkins, Harry, 70 et seq.
Howe, C. D., 79
Humphrey, Dr. J., 214-14
hydrogen as moderator, 82

IMPERIAL CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES,

108, in, 114, 120
Imperial College of Science, 142,

H5i J 73

implosion, detonation by, 192
industry, isotopes in, 208 et seq.
inspectors, public health, 230
instrumentation at weapons tests,

144, 145, 146, 151, 152
iodine, radioactive, 203, 206
iridium, radioactive, 206
isotopes, 198-214
isotopes, statistics, 21 1, 212

JEANS, SIR J., 38

JEEP reactor, 86

Joliot, Prof., 40, 46, 48, 55, 56, 85

Joliot-Curie, Dr. Irene, 40, 42

Jones, A. B., 91

Karangi, H.M.A.S., 150
Kendall, J., 108, 111-14, 122,

126, Plate 1 6
Kowarski, Dr. Lew, 46, 55, 56,

84
Krakatoa, eruption of Mt, 228

LAURISTEN, PROF., 65
Lawrence, Dr. E. O., 39, 58, 65,

84

leaks traced by isotopes, 209
Lee, Dr. E., 125, 126
Lilienthal, David E., 77
locomotives, atomic, 241
Los Alamos (U.S.), atomic

weapons laboratory, 81, 141,

143
Lucas, Brigadier, 178, 179, 184,

189, Plate 10
Lyon, R., 172, 173

MACKENZIE KING, MR., 68, 78,

79

Mackey, D., 112
Macleod, Ian, 217
McMahon Act, 20, 21, 70
McMahon, Gen. Brien, 19-21,

28, 29, 77

McMillan, Prof. E. M., 58
manganese, radioactive, 210
manpower in British project,

231, 243
manpower problem, 109, 117,

134
manpower, shortage of, 243

Massey, Prof. H. S. W., 79
Mather, Prof. K., 218
MAUD Committee, 53 et seq.
Mayneord, Prof. W. V., 202
Medical Research Council, 90,

212
Medical Research, National

Institute of, 212, 213

Meinter, Dr. Lise, 40, 44, 45, 48,

52

Mendeleev, D. L, 198, 199

metallurgy. See also Fuel Ele-
ments, 100, 101

Meteorology, 153, 177, 182, 183,
1 88

Mitchell, Miss, 133-5, r 39

Moderator, use of, 81, 126, 158

Monte Bello atom test, 23, 113,
139, 149-55, 178

Montreal establishment, 79, 84,
88, 91, 94

Moon, Prof. P. B., 52, 140, Plate
2

Moore, R. V., 159, 160, 161

Morris, H., 119

mutations through radiation, 2 1 5

NAGASAKI, 144, 147

Narvik, H.M.S., 151

Nature, 45, 227

Nautilus, U.S.S., 158

neutrons, function and slowing

down of, 8 1
neutrons, number produced by

fission, 46, 47, 80
Nier, Dr. A. O., 58
Noddackj Dr. Ida, 43, 44
NoSl-Martin, M., 220, 221
Norsk Hydro, 65, 82, 86
Norway, 14, 86
NRX, Canadian reactor, 84, 91,

92,93

INDEX 251

PACKAGED power units, 241
Parliamentary announcement,

18, 138

Parsons, Bill, 112
Pegram, Dr. G., 57, 66, 67
Peierls, Prof. R., 52, 54, 58, 64,

67, 79i 88, 140
Penney, Sir W., 105, 113, 115,

124, 139, 140, 142-55, 178,

185, 193, 232, 234, Plate 10
periodic table, 198-99
Perrin, Mr. M., 63, 66
Perrott, Sir D., 105, 232
phosphorus, radioactive, 206
piles, atomic. See Reactors
PIPPA reactors, 126, 161, 162,

165

"planned entry", 167, 168
plastics, 210

platinum, radioactive, 206
Plowden, Sir E., 105, 232, 233,

235> 236

PLUTO reactor, 167
plutonium, costing of, 36
Plym, H.M.S., 149, 153, 154
political factors, 22, 235
Portal, Lord, 106, 107
Powell, Prof. C. F., 48
Preston, R. W., Plate 16
processing, improvements in,

1 68
programme, British nucleai ,

232, 233, 235
Pryce, Prof. M. H. L., 94

OAK RIDGE atomic factory

(U.S.), 19, 72, 81
Oliphant, Prof. M., 79, 88, 90,

190, Plate 2
Ostwalt, Prof., 61
Owen, W. L., 105, 106, 107, 108,

109, 1 10, in, 112, 113, 115,

Plate i 6
oxides of nitrogen, 183, 187

QUEBEC AGREEMENT, 73 et seq.

RADIATION from natural sources,
215, 220

radiation, public health inspec-
tors, 222, 223

radiation, tolerance dose, 21 7-20

Radiobiological Research Estab-
lishment, 90

252 INDEX

Radiochemical Centre, Amer-
sham, 211, 213, 214

radon, 205

rain caused by bombs, 226, 227,
228

Randers, Dr. G., 86

Ratcliffe, J. A., Plate 2

reactors, American, 80 et seq.

reactors, list of British, 1 65-7

reactors, runaway of, 126

remote control of chemical pro-
cessing, 131

remote handling of used fuel
rods, 130

Rennie, C., 156

Risley atomic establishment, 107
et seq.

Robson, J., 122

Roosevelt, Pres., 66, 70 et seq.

Ross, K. B., 109

Rotblat, Prof. Joseph, 25, 140,

194
Rotherham, L., 109, 242, 243,

244, Plate 1 6

Royal Engineers, 151, 153
Royal Gunpowder Factory, 173
Royal Institution, 152
Royal Marines, 151
Royal Marsden Hospital, 201,

205

Royal Society, 143
Russia, 14, 23, 87, 193, 194,

198
Rutherford, Lord, 38, 48, 84,

109, 200, 238, 241, Plate 2

SAFETY, 136, 137, 167, 168, 244,

245

Savitch, Dr. P., 42
Schonland, Dr. B. F. J., 239
scientists, shortage of, 243
sea on fire, setting, 226-7
Sea Wolf, U.S.S., 158
security, 97, 98, 151, 153, 176,

179, 180,234,235,244

Seligman, Dr. H., 211, 223
Sellafield. See Windscale
Sheard, K., 112
ships, atomic, 236, 237
Shirlaw, D. A., Plate 16
shoe X-rays, danger of, 225
Simon, Sir Francis, 34, 54, 58,

60, 64, 67

Skinner, Prof. H. W. B., 90
smog, 36
Smyth Report, 57, 95, 108, 192,

193

Soddy, Prof. F., 48, 84, 199, 226
sodium, radioactive, 206
sound waves after explosion,

187, 1 88, 189
Spence, Dr. R., 94, 95, 96
spies, American, 193
Springfields atomic factory, 125,

169, 173, 222

Stevens, Maj.-Gen. J. E. S., 178
Stimson, Mr., 72, 75
storms, energy in, 227
Strassmann, Dr. F., 42, 45, 48,

5 .
strontium, radioactive, 206

submarine, British project, 159,

1 60

Suffolk, Earl of, 55, 56
Supply, Ministry of, 232
Sutton, Sir G., 227, 228
Svedlund, Gen. Nils, 86
Sweden, 86, 87
Szilard, Dr. L., 46

TANTALUM, radioactive, 206
Tatlock, J., 1 10, in
Taylor, Sir G., 79, 143
telecurie units, 205
television, use of, 102
Thomson, Sir G., 48, 50, 51

et seq.

Thomson, Sir J. J., 48, Plate 2
Thurso, risk at, 230
Tizard, Sir H., 51, 52

Tongue, Mr., 94

Torlesse, Rear Adml. A. D., 149,

150

tracers, radioactive, 207, 211
Tracker, H.M.S., 153
Truman, Pres., 19, 77
"Tube Alloys", 64 etseq., 73, 97,

122
Turner, C., 112, 113, 122, 125,

Plate i 6

INDEX 253

wastes, disposal of radioactive,

221-4, 229, 230
watch-dial painters, 218
"Water Boiler", Los Alamos, 83
Waverley, Lord, 60, 71 et seq., 88
weapons, 22-31, 140-55, 173-

197, 226-9

weapons, design of, 191-7
White, S., 235
Wilson, Gp.-Capt. D., 184
Winant, Mr., 78
Windscale atomic factory, 124,

127, 128, 132 et seq., 167, 168,

169, 170, 191, 192, 194, 222

Uranium flow from mine to

factory, diag., 104
uranium, separation of, by dif- Woomera rocket range, 177, 183

fusion, 169-174 Worth, Bill, 176

uranium separation, diag., 59
uranium, sources of, 54
Urey, Prof. H. C., 66, 67

VACCINES, isotopes help prepare,

210
Volkoff, Prof., 94

WALLACE, VICE-PRES., 66

X-RAY scanner, 201, 202
X-rays from isotopes, 204, 208,
215^ seq.

Z-CLOUD after Monte Bello test,

!54> J 77

^eebrugge, H.M.S., 151
ZEEP, reactor, 84, 93

Walton, E. T. S., 200, 238, ZEPHYR reactor, 163, 165

Plate 2
Warrego, H.M.A.S., 150

ZEUS reactor, 167
Zinn, Dr. W. H., 46